We propose using a multilabel probing task to assess the morphosyntactic representations of multilingual word embeddings. This tweak on canonical probing makes it easy to explore morphosyntactic representations, both holistically and at the level of individual features (e.g., gender, number, case), and leads more naturally to the study of how language models handle co-occurring features (e.g., agreement phenomena). We demonstrate this task with multilingual BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), training probes for seven typologically diverse languages: Afrikaans, Croatian, Finnish, Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, and Turkish. Through this simple but robust paradigm, we verify that multilingual BERT renders many morphosyntactic features simultaneously extractable. We further evaluate the probes on six held-out languages: Arabic, Chinese, Marathi, Slovenian, Tagalog, and Yoruba. This zero-shot style of probing has the added benefit of revealing which cross-linguistic properties a language model recognizes as being shared by multiple languages.

Although large-scale pretrained language models, such as BERT and RoBERTa, have achieved superhuman performance on in-distribution test sets, their performance suffers on out-of-distribution test sets (e.g., on contrast sets). Building contrast sets often requires human-expert annotation, which is expensive and hard to create on a large scale. In this work, we propose a Linguistically-Informed Transformation (LIT) method to automatically generate contrast sets, which enables practitioners to explore linguistic phenomena of interests as well as compose different phenomena. Experimenting with our method on SNLI and MNLI shows that current pretrained language models, although being claimed to contain sufficient linguistic knowledge, struggle on our automatically generated contrast sets. Furthermore, we improve models’ performance on the contrast sets by applying LIT to augment the training data, without affecting performance on the original data.

We propose a general framework to study language emergence through signaling games with neural agents. Using a continuous latent space, we are able to (i) train using backpropagation, (ii) show that discrete messages nonetheless naturally emerge. We explore whether categorical perception effects follow and show that the messages are not compositional.

How are the meanings of linguistic expressions related to their use in concrete cognitive tasks? Visual identification tasks show human speakers can exhibit considerable variation in their understanding, representation and verification of certain quantifiers. This paper initiates an investigation into neural models of these psycho-semantic tasks. We trained two types of network – a convolutional neural network (CNN) model and a recurrent model of visual attention (RAM) – on the “most” verification task from Pietroski2009, manipulating the visual scene and novel notions of task duration. Our results qualitatively mirror certain features of human performance (such as sensitivity to the ratio of set sizes, indicating a reliance on approximate number) while differing in interesting ways (such as exhibiting a subtly different pattern for the effect of image type). We conclude by discussing the prospects for using neural models as cognitive models of this and other psychosemantic tasks.

We study the role of linguistic context in predicting quantifiers (‘few’, ‘all’). We collect crowdsourced data from human participants and test various models in a local (single-sentence) and a global context (multi-sentence) condition. Models significantly out-perform humans in the former setting and are only slightly better in the latter. While human performance improves with more linguistic context (especially on proportional quantifiers), model performance suffers. Models are very effective in exploiting lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns; humans are better at genuinely understanding the meaning of the (global) context.