We analyze if large language models are able to predict patterns of human reading behavior. We compare the performance of language-specific and multilingual pretrained transformer models to predict reading time measures reflecting natural human sentence processing on Dutch, English, German, and Russian texts. This results in accurate models of human reading behavior, which indicates that transformer models implicitly encode relative importance in language in a way that is comparable to human processing mechanisms. We find that BERT and XLM models successfully predict a range of eye tracking features. In a series of experiments, we analyze the cross-domain and cross-language abilities of these models and show how they reflect human sentence processing.

Multilingual Language Models Predict Human Reading Behavior

We probe the layers in multilingual BERT (mBERT) for phylogenetic and geographic language signals across 100 languages and compute language distances based on the mBERT representations. We 1) employ the language distances to infer and evaluate language trees, finding that they are close to the reference family tree in terms of quartet tree distance, 2) perform distance matrix regression analysis, finding that the language distances can be best explained by phylogenetic and worst by structural factors and 3) present a novel measure for measuring diachronic meaning stability (based on cross-lingual representation variability) which correlates significantly with published ranked lists based on linguistic approaches. Our results contribute to the nascent field of typological interpretability of cross-lingual text representations.

Probing Multilingual BERT for Genetic and Typological Signals



<i>**Session Chair: ** Svitlana Volkova</i><br><br>

1B-Oral: Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP

technical paper

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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NAACL 2021

POSTER5: Semantics 1

poster

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

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.

Lisa Beinborn

2

5

Presentations

Multilingual Language Models Predict Human Reading Behavior

Probing Multilingual BERT for Genetic and Typological Signals

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