@inproceedings{kogkalidis-wijnholds-2022-discontinuous,
    title = "Discontinuous Constituency and {BERT}: A Case Study of {D}utch",
    author = "Kogkalidis, Konstantinos  and
      Wijnholds, Gijs",
    editor = "Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2022.findings-acl.298/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-acl.298",
    pages = "3776--3785",
    abstract = "In this paper, we set out to quantify the syntactic capacity of BERT in the evaluation regime of non-context free patterns, as occurring in Dutch. We devise a test suite based on a mildly context-sensitive formalism, from which we derive grammars that capture the linguistic phenomena of control verb nesting and verb raising. The grammars, paired with a small lexicon, provide us with a large collection of naturalistic utterances, annotated with verb-subject pairings, that serve as the evaluation test bed for an attention-based span selection probe. Our results, backed by extensive analysis, suggest that the models investigated fail in the implicit acquisition of the dependencies examined."
}