United Arab Emirates

Structural probing work has found evidence for latent syntactic information in pre-trained language models. However, much of this analysis has focused on monolingual models, and analyses of multilingual models have employed correlational methods that are confounded by the choice of probing tasks. In this study, we causally probe multilingual language models (XGLM and multilingual BERT) as well as monolingual BERT-based models across various languages; we do this by performing counterfactual perturbations on neuron activations and observing the effect on models&#39; subject-verb agreement probabilities. We observe where in the model and to what extent syntactic agreement is encoded in each language. We find significant neuron overlap across languages in autoregressive multilingual language models, but not masked language models. We also find two distinct layer-wise effect patterns and two distinct sets of neurons used for syntactic agreement, depending on whether the subject and verb are separated by other tokens. Finally, we find that behavioral analyses of language models are likely underestimating how sensitive masked language models are to syntactic information.

EMNLP 2022

Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Neurons in Multilingual Language Models

causal probing

interpretability

syntax

multilingual

language models

Structural probing work has found evidence for latent syntactic information in pre-trained language models. However, much of this analysis has focused on monolingual models, and analyses of multilingual models have employed correlational methods that are confounded by the choice of probing tasks. In this study, we causally probe multilingual language models (XGLM and multilingual BERT) as well as monolingual BERT-based models across various languages; we do this by performing counterfactual perturbations on neuron activations and observing the effect on models' subject-verb agreement probabilities. We observe where in the model and to what extent syntactic agreement is encoded in each language. We find significant neuron overlap across languages in autoregressive multilingual language models, but not masked language models. We also find two distinct layer-wise effect patterns and two distinct sets of neurons used for syntactic agreement, depending on whether the subject and verb are separated by other tokens. Finally, we find that behavioral analyses of language models are likely underestimating how sensitive masked language models are to syntactic information.

workshop paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

With the rise of online hate speech, automatic detection of Hate Speech, Offensive texts as a natural language processing task is getting popular. However, very little research has been done to detect unintended social bias from these toxic language datasets. This paper introduces a new dataset ToxicBias curated from the existing dataset of Kaggle competition named "Jigsaw Unintended Bias in Toxicity Classification". We aim to detect social biases, their categories, and targeted groups. The dataset contains instances annotated for five different bias categories, viz., gender, race/ethnicity, religion, political, and LGBTQ. We train transformer-based models using our curated datasets and report baseline performance for bias identification, target generation, and bias implications. Model biases and their mitigation are also discussed in detail. Our study motivates a systematic extraction of social bias data from toxic language datasets.

Detecting Unintended Social Bias in Toxic Language Datasets

Despite neural language models qualitatively capturing many human linguistic behaviors, recent work has demonstrated that they underestimate the true processing costs of ungrammatical structures.  We extend these more fine-grained comparisons between humans and models by investigating the interaction between Principle B and coreference processing.  While humans use Principle B to block certain structural positions from affecting their incremental processing, we find that GPT-based language models are influenced by ungrammatical positions. We conclude by relating the mismatch between neural models and humans to properties of training data and suggest that certain aspects of human processing behavior do not directly follow from linguistic data.

Incremental Processing of Principle B: Mismatches Between Neural Models and Humans

We introduce a constraint-based parser for Minimalist Grammars (MG), implemented as a working computer program, that falls within the long established "Parsing as Deduction" framework. The parser takes as input an MG lexicon and a (partially specified) pairing of sound with meaning - i.e. a word sequence paired with a semantic representation - and, using an axiomatized logic, declaratively deduces syntactic derivations (i.e. parse trees) that comport with the specified interface conditions. The parser is built on the first axiomatization of MGs to use Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT), encoding in a constraint-based way the principles of minimalist syntax. The parser operates via a novel solution method: it assembles an SMT model of an MG derivation, translates the inputs into SMT formulae that constrain the model, and then solves the model using the Z3 SMT-solver, a high-performance automatic theorem prover; as the SMT-model has finite size (being bounded by the inputs), it is decidable and thus solvable in finite time. The output derivation is then recovered from the model solution. To demonstrate this, we run the parser on several representative inputs and examine how the output derivations differ when the inputs are partially vs. fully specified. We conclude by discussing the parser's extensibility and how a linguist can use it to automatically identify: (i) dependencies between input interface conditions and principles of syntax, and (ii) contradictions or redundancies between the model axioms encoding principles of syntax.

Parsing as Deduction Revisited: Using an Automatic Theorem Prover to Solve an SMT Model of a Minimalist Parser

Language models are often trained on text alone, without additional grounding. There is debate as to how much of natural language semantics can be inferred from such a procedure. We prove that entailment judgments between sentences can be extracted from an ideal language model that has perfectly learned its target distribution, assuming the training sentences are generated by Gricean agents, i.e., agents who follow fundamental principles of communication from the linguistic theory of pragmatics. We also show entailment judgments can be decoded from the predictions of a language model trained on such Gricean data. Our results reveal a pathway for understanding the semantic information encoded in unlabeled linguistic data and a potential framework for extracting semantics from language models.

Entailment Semantics Can Be Extracted from an Ideal Language Model

We present a methodology that explores how sentence structure is reflected in neural representations of machine translation systems.  We demonstrate our model-agnostic approach with the Transformer English-German translation model. We analyze neuron-level correlation of activations between paraphrases while discussing the methodology challenges and the need for confound analysis to isolate the effects of shallow cues. We find that similarity between activation patterns can be mostly accounted for by similarity in word choice and sentence length. Following that, we manipulate neuron activations to control the syntactic form of the output. We show this intervention to be somewhat successful, indicating that deep models capture sentence-structure distinctions, despite finding no such indication at the neuron level. To conduct our experiments, we develop a semi-automatic method to generate meaning-preserving minimal pair paraphrases (active-passive voice and adverbial clause-noun phrase) and compile a corpus of such pairs.

On Neurons Invariant to Sentence Structural Changes in Neural Machine Translation

The mechanisms underlying human communication have been under investigation for decades, but the answer to how understanding between locutors emerges remains incomplete. Interaction theories suggest the development of a structural alignment between the speakers, allowing for the construction of a shared knowledge base (common ground). In this paper, we propose to apply metrics derived from information theory to quantify the amount of information exchanged between participants, the dynamics of information exchanges, to provide an objective way to measure the common ground instantiation. We focus on a corpus of free conversations augmented with prosodic segmentation and an expert annotation of thematic episodes. We show that during free conversations, the amount of information remains globally constant at the scale of the conversation, but varies depending on the thematic structuring, underlining the role of the speaker introducing the theme. We propose an original methodology applied to uncontrolled material.

Shared knowledge in natural conversations: can entropy metrics shed light on information transfers?

The lack of wide coverage datasets annotated with everyday metaphorical expressions for languages other than English is striking. This means that most research on supervised metaphor detection has been published only for that language. In order to address this issue, this work presents the first corpus annotated with naturally occurring metaphors in Spanish large enough to develop systems to perform metaphor detection. The presented dataset, CoMeta, includes texts from various domains, namely, news, political discourse, Wikipedia and reviews. In order to label CoMeta, we apply the MIPVU method, the guidelines most commonly used to systematically annotate metaphor on real data. We use our newly created dataset to provide competitive baselines by fine-tuning several multilingual and monolingual state-of-the-art large language models. Furthermore, by leveraging the existing VUAM English data in addition to CoMeta, we present the, to the best of our knowledge, first cross-lingual experiments on supervised metaphor detection. Finally, we perform a detailed error analysis that explores the seemingly high transfer of everyday metaphor across these two languages and datasets.

Leveraging a New Spanish Corpus for Multilingual and Cross-lingual Metaphor Detection

Text Simplification (TS) is the task of converting a text into a form that is easier to read while maintaining the meaning of the original text. A sub-task of TS is Cognitive Simplification (CS), converting text to a form that is readily understood by people with cognitive disabilities without rendering it childish or simplistic. This sub-task has yet to be explored with neural methods in NLP, and resources for it are scarcely available. In this paper, we present a method for incorporating knowledge from the cognitive accessibility domain into a TS model, by introducing an inductive bias regarding what simplification operations to use. We show that by adding this inductive bias to a TS-trained model, it is able to adapt better to CS without ever seeing CS data, and outperform a baseline model on a traditional TS benchmark. In addition, we provide a novel test dataset for CS, and analyze the differences between CS corpora and existing TS corpora, in terms of how simplification operations are applied.

Cognitive Simplification Operations Improve Text Simplification

Cross-lingual transfer of parsing models has been shown to work well for several closely-related languages, but predicting the success in other cases remains hard. Our study is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of linguistic distance on the transfer of UD parsers. As an alternative to syntactic typological distances extracted from URIEL, we propose three text-based feature spaces and show that they can be more precise predictors, especially on a more local scale, when only shorter distances are taken into account. Our analyses also reveal that the good coverage in typological databases is not among the factors that explain good transfer.

On Language Spaces, Scales and Cross-Lingual Transfer of UD Parsers

The success of scene graphs for visual scene understanding has brought attention to the benefits of abstracting a visual input (e.g., image) into a structured representation, where entities (people and objects) are nodes connected by edges specifying their relations. Building these representations, however, requires expensive manual annotation in the form of images paired with their scene graphs or frames. These formalisms remain limited in the nature of entities and relations they can capture. In this paper, we propose to leverage a widely-used meaning representation in the field of natural language processing, the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), to address these shortcomings. Compared to scene graphs, which largely emphasize spatial relationships, our visual AMR graphs are more linguistically informed, with a focus on higher-level semantic concepts extrapolated from visual input. Moreover, they allow us to generate meta-AMR graphs to unify information contained in multiple image descriptions under one representation. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, we demonstrate that we can re-purpose an existing text-to-AMR parser to parse images into AMRs. Our findings point to important future research directions for improved scene understanding.

Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Neurons in Multilingual Language Models

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