@inproceedings{de-varda-zamparelli-2022-multilingualism,
title = "Multilingualism Encourages Recursion: a Transfer Study with m{BERT}",
author = "De Varda, Andrea and
Zamparelli, Roberto",
editor = "Vylomova, Ekaterina and
Ponti, Edoardo and
Cotterell, Ryan",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP",
month = jul,
year = "2022",
address = "Seattle, Washington",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.1",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.sigtyp-1.1",
pages = "1--10",
abstract = "The present work constitutes an attempt to investigate the relational structures learnt by mBERT, a multilingual transformer-based network, with respect to different cross-linguistic regularities proposed in the fields of theoretical and quantitative linguistics. We pursued this objective by relying on a zero-shot transfer experiment, evaluating the model{'}s ability to generalize its native task to artificial languages that could either respect or violate some proposed language universal, and comparing its performance to the output of BERT, a monolingual model with an identical configuration. We created four artificial corpora through a Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar by manipulating the distribution of tokens and the structure of their dependency relations. We showed that while both models were favoured by a Zipfian distribution of the tokens and by the presence of head-dependency type structures, the multilingual transformer network exhibited a stronger reliance on hierarchical cues compared to its monolingual counterpart.",
}
Markdown (Informal)
[Multilingualism Encourages Recursion: a Transfer Study with mBERT](https://aclanthology.org/2022.sigtyp-1.1) (De Varda & Zamparelli, SIGTYP 2022)
ACL