Successful machine learning systems currently rely on massive amounts of data, which are very effective in hiding some of the shallowness of the learned models. To help train models with more complex and compositional skills, we need challenging data, on which a system is successful only if it detects structure and regularities, that will allow it to generalize. In this paper, we describe a French dataset (BLM-AgrF) for learning the underlying rules of subject-verb agreement in sentences, developed in the BLM framework, a new task inspired by visual IQ tests known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices. In this task, an instance consists of sequences of sentences with specific attributes. To predict the correct answer as the next element of the sequence, a model must correctly detect the generative model used to produce the dataset. We provide details and share a dataset built following this methodology. Two exploratory baselines based on commonly used architectures show that despite the simplicity of the phenomenon, it is a complex problem for deep learning systems.

Neural language models have achieved state-of-the-art performances on many NLP tasks, and recently have been shown to learn a number of hierarchically-sensitive syntactic dependencies between individual words. However, equally important for language processing is the ability to combine words into phrasal constituents, and use constituent-level features to drive downstream expectations. Here we investigate neural models’ ability to represent constituent-level features, using coordinated noun phrases as a case study. We assess whether different neural language models trained on English and French represent phrase-level number and gender features, and use those features to drive downstream expectations. Our results suggest that models use a linear combination of NP constituent number to drive CoordNP/verb number agreement. This behavior is highly regular and even sensitive to local syntactic context, however it differs crucially from observed human behavior. Models have less success with gender agreement. Models trained on large corpora perform best, and there is no obvious advantage for models trained using explicit syntactic supervision.