What Do Transformers Know about Government?

Jue Hou, Anisia Katinskaia, Lari Kotilainen, Sathianpong Trangcasanchai, Anh-Duc Vu, Roman Yangarber

Abstract
This paper investigates what insights about linguistic features and what knowledge about the structure of natural language can be obtained from the encodings in transformer language models. In particular, we explore how BERT encodes the government relation between constituents in a sentence. We use several probing classifiers, and data from two morphologically rich languages. Our experiments show that information about government is encoded across all transformer layers, but predominantly in the early layers of the model. We find that, for both languages, a small number of attention heads encode enough information about the government relations to enable us to train a classifier capable of discovering new, previously unknown types of government, never seen in the training data. Currently, data is lacking for the research community working on grammatical constructions, and government in particular. We release the Government Bank—a dataset defining the government relations for thousands of lemmas in the languages in our experiments.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1518
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
17459–17472
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1518
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jue Hou, Anisia Katinskaia, Lari Kotilainen, Sathianpong Trangcasanchai, Anh-Duc Vu, and Roman Yangarber. 2024. What Do Transformers Know about Government?. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 17459–17472, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
What Do Transformers Know about Government? (Hou et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.1518.pdf
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