A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models

Jennifer Hu, Jon Gauthier, Peng Qian, Ethan Wilcox, Roger Levy


Abstract
While state-of-the-art neural network models continue to achieve lower perplexity scores on language modeling benchmarks, it remains unknown whether optimizing for broad-coverage predictive performance leads to human-like syntactic knowledge. Furthermore, existing work has not provided a clear picture about the model properties required to produce proper syntactic generalizations. We present a systematic evaluation of the syntactic knowledge of neural language models, testing 20 combinations of model types and data sizes on a set of 34 English-language syntactic test suites. We find substantial differences in syntactic generalization performance by model architecture, with sequential models underperforming other architectures. Factorially manipulating model architecture and training dataset size (1M-40M words), we find that variability in syntactic generalization performance is substantially greater by architecture than by dataset size for the corpora tested in our experiments. Our results also reveal a dissociation between perplexity and syntactic generalization performance.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.158
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1725–1744
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.158
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.158
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jennifer Hu, Jon Gauthier, Peng Qian, Ethan Wilcox, and Roger Levy. 2020. A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1725–1744, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models (Hu et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.158.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929407
Code
 cpllab/syntactic-generalization