On the relative impact of categorical and semantic information on the induction of self-embedding structures

Antoine Venant, Yutaka Suzuki


Abstract
We investigate the impact of center embedding and selectional restrictions on neural latent tree models’ tendency to induce self-embedding structures. To this aim we compare their behavior in different controlled artificial environments involving noun phrases modified by relative clauses, with different quantity of available training data. Our results provide evidence that the existence of multiple center self-embedding is a stronger incentive than selectional restrictions alone, but that the combination of both is the best incentive overall. We also show that different architectures benefit very differently from these incentives.
Anthology ID:
2025.brigap-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on the Bridges and Gaps between Formal and Computational Linguistics (BriGap-2)
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Düsseldorf, Germany
Editors:
Timothée Bernard, Timothee Mickus
Venues:
BriGap | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
79–96
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/2025.brigap-1.9/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antoine Venant and Yutaka Suzuki. 2025. On the relative impact of categorical and semantic information on the induction of self-embedding structures. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on the Bridges and Gaps between Formal and Computational Linguistics (BriGap-2), pages 79–96, Düsseldorf, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the relative impact of categorical and semantic information on the induction of self-embedding structures (Venant & Suzuki, BriGap 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/2025.brigap-1.9.pdf