A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models
Jennifer Hu, Jon Gauthier, Peng Qian, Ethan Wilcox, Roger Levy
Abstract
While state-of-the-art neural network models continue to achieve lower perplexity scores on language modeling benchmarks, it remains unknown whether optimizing for broad-coverage predictive performance leads to human-like syntactic knowledge. Furthermore, existing work has not provided a clear picture about the model properties required to produce proper syntactic generalizations. We present a systematic evaluation of the syntactic knowledge of neural language models, testing 20 combinations of model types and data sizes on a set of 34 English-language syntactic test suites. We find substantial differences in syntactic generalization performance by model architecture, with sequential models underperforming other architectures. Factorially manipulating model architecture and training dataset size (1M-40M words), we find that variability in syntactic generalization performance is substantially greater by architecture than by dataset size for the corpora tested in our experiments. Our results also reveal a dissociation between perplexity and syntactic generalization performance.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.158
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1725–1744
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.158
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.158
- Cite (ACL):
- Jennifer Hu, Jon Gauthier, Peng Qian, Ethan Wilcox, and Roger Levy. 2020. A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1725–1744, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models (Hu et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2020.acl-main.158.pdf
- Code
- cpllab/syntactic-generalization