Anhad Mohananey


2020

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BLiMP: A Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English
Alex Warstadt | Alicia Parrish | Haokun Liu | Anhad Mohananey | Wei Peng | Sheng-Fu Wang | Samuel R. Bowman
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2020

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BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for English
Alex Warstadt | Alicia Parrish | Haokun Liu | Anhad Mohananey | Wei Peng | Sheng-Fu Wang | Samuel R. Bowman
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

We introduce The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs (BLiMP),1 a challenge set for evaluating the linguistic knowledge of language models (LMs) on major grammatical phenomena in English. BLiMP consists of 67 individual datasets, each containing 1,000 minimal pairs—that is, pairs of minimally different sentences that contrast in grammatical acceptability and isolate specific phenomenon in syntax, morphology, or semantics. We generate the data according to linguist-crafted grammar templates, and human aggregate agreement with the labels is 96.4%. We evaluate n-gram, LSTM, and Transformer (GPT-2 and Transformer-XL) LMs by observing whether they assign a higher probability to the acceptable sentence in each minimal pair. We find that state-of-the-art models identify morphological contrasts related to agreement reliably, but they struggle with some subtle semantic and syntactic phenomena, such as negative polarity items and extraction islands.

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Self-Training for Unsupervised Parsing with PRPN
Anhad Mohananey | Katharina Kann | Samuel R. Bowman
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies and the IWPT 2020 Shared Task on Parsing into Enhanced Universal Dependencies

Neural unsupervised parsing (UP) models learn to parse without access to syntactic annotations, while being optimized for another task like language modeling. In this work, we propose self-training for neural UP models: we leverage aggregated annotations predicted by copies of our model as supervision for future copies. To be able to use our model’s predictions during training, we extend a recent neural UP architecture, the PRPN (Shen et al., 2018a), such that it can be trained in a semi-supervised fashion. We then add examples with parses predicted by our model to our unlabeled UP training data. Our self-trained model outperforms the PRPN by 8.1% F1 and the previous state of the art by 1.6% F1. In addition, we show that our architecture can also be helpful for semi-supervised parsing in ultra-low-resource settings.

2019

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Investigating BERT’s Knowledge of Language: Five Analysis Methods with NPIs
Alex Warstadt | Yu Cao | Ioana Grosu | Wei Peng | Hagen Blix | Yining Nie | Anna Alsop | Shikha Bordia | Haokun Liu | Alicia Parrish | Sheng-Fu Wang | Jason Phang | Anhad Mohananey | Phu Mon Htut | Paloma Jeretic | Samuel R. Bowman
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Though state-of-the-art sentence representation models can perform tasks requiring significant knowledge of grammar, it is an open question how best to evaluate their grammatical knowledge. We explore five experimental methods inspired by prior work evaluating pretrained sentence representation models. We use a single linguistic phenomenon, negative polarity item (NPI) licensing, as a case study for our experiments. NPIs like any are grammatical only if they appear in a licensing environment like negation (Sue doesn’t have any cats vs. *Sue has any cats). This phenomenon is challenging because of the variety of NPI licensing environments that exist. We introduce an artificially generated dataset that manipulates key features of NPI licensing for the experiments. We find that BERT has significant knowledge of these features, but its success varies widely across different experimental methods. We conclude that a variety of methods is necessary to reveal all relevant aspects of a model’s grammatical knowledge in a given domain.

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Neural Unsupervised Parsing Beyond English
Katharina Kann | Anhad Mohananey | Samuel R. Bowman | Kyunghyun Cho
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP (DeepLo 2019)

Recently, neural network models which automatically infer syntactic structure from raw text have started to achieve promising results. However, earlier work on unsupervised parsing shows large performance differences between non-neural models trained on corpora in different languages, even for comparable amounts of data. With that in mind, we train instances of the PRPN architecture (Shen et al., 2018)—one of these unsupervised neural network parsers—for Arabic, Chinese, English, and German. We find that (i) the model strongly outperforms trivial baselines and, thus, acquires at least some parsing ability for all languages; (ii) good hyperparameter values seem to be universal; (iii) how the model benefits from larger training set sizes depends on the corpus, with the model achieving the largest performance gains when increasing the number of sentences from 2,500 to 12,500 for English. In addition, we show that, by sharing parameters between the related languages German and English, we can improve the model’s unsupervised parsing F1 score by up to 4% in the low-resource setting.