Language Modeling Teaches You More than Translation Does: Lessons Learned Through Auxiliary Syntactic Task Analysis

Kelly Zhang, Samuel Bowman


Abstract
Recently, researchers have found that deep LSTMs trained on tasks like machine translation learn substantial syntactic and semantic information about their input sentences, including part-of-speech. These findings begin to shed light on why pretrained representations, like ELMo and CoVe, are so beneficial for neural language understanding models. We still, though, do not yet have a clear understanding of how the choice of pretraining objective affects the type of linguistic information that models learn. With this in mind, we compare four objectives—language modeling, translation, skip-thought, and autoencoding—on their ability to induce syntactic and part-of-speech information, holding constant the quantity and genre of the training data, as well as the LSTM architecture.
Anthology ID:
W18-5448
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
Month:
November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Tal Linzen, Grzegorz Chrupała, Afra Alishahi
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
359–361
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-5448
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-5448
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kelly Zhang and Samuel Bowman. 2018. Language Modeling Teaches You More than Translation Does: Lessons Learned Through Auxiliary Syntactic Task Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 359–361, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language Modeling Teaches You More than Translation Does: Lessons Learned Through Auxiliary Syntactic Task Analysis (Zhang & Bowman, EMNLP 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/W18-5448.pdf