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Recursive noun phrases (NPs) have interesting semantic properties. For example, &quot;my favorite new movie&quot; is not necessarily my favorite movie, whereas &quot;my new favorite movie&quot; is. This is common sense to humans, yet it is unknown whether language models have such knowledge. We introduce the Recursive Noun Phrase Challenge (RNPC), a dataset of three textual inference tasks involving textual entailment and event plausibility comparison, precisely targeting the understanding of recursive NPs. When evaluated on RNPC, state-of-the-art Transformer models only perform around chance. Still, we show that such knowledge is learnable with appropriate data. We further probe the models for relevant linguistic features that can be learned from our tasks, including modifier semantic category and modifier scope. Finally, models trained on RNPC achieve strong zero-shot performance on an extrinsic Harm Detection evaluation task, showing the usefulness of the understanding of recursive NPs in downstream applications.

NAACL 2022

Is &quot;My Favorite New Movie&quot; My Favorite Movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

Recursive noun phrases (NPs) have interesting semantic properties. For example, "my favorite new movie" is not necessarily my favorite movie, whereas "my new favorite movie" is. This is common sense to humans, yet it is unknown whether language models have such knowledge. We introduce the Recursive Noun Phrase Challenge (RNPC), a dataset of three textual inference tasks involving textual entailment and event plausibility comparison, precisely targeting the understanding of recursive NPs. When evaluated on RNPC, state-of-the-art Transformer models only perform around chance. Still, we show that such knowledge is learnable with appropriate data. We further probe the models for relevant linguistic features that can be learned from our tasks, including modifier semantic category and modifier scope. Finally, models trained on RNPC achieve strong zero-shot performance on an extrinsic Harm Detection evaluation task, showing the usefulness of the understanding of recursive NPs in downstream applications.

Is "My Favorite New Movie" My Favorite Movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases

technical paper

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Is "My Favorite New Movie" My Favorite Movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases

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Is "My Favorite New Movie" My Favorite Movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases

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Lifelong Pretraining: Continually Adapting Language Models to Emerging Corpora

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