Related papers: How to Probe Sentence Embeddings in Low-Resource Languages: On Structural Design Choices for Probing Task Evaluation

How to Probe Sentence Embeddings in Low-Resource Languages: On Structural Design Choices for Probing Task Evaluation

URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.09109v2
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2020 12:38:37 GMT
Title: How to Probe Sentence Embeddings in Low-Resource Languages: On Structural Design Choices for Probing Task Evaluation
Authors: Steffen Eger and Johannes Daxenberger and Iryna Gurevych
Abstract summary: We investigate sensitivity of probing task results to structural design choices. We probe embeddings in a multilingual setup with design choices that lie in a'stable region', as we identify for English. We find that results on English do not transfer to other languages.
Score: 82.96358326053115
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
Abstract: Sentence encoders map sentences to real valued vectors for use in downstream applications. To peek into these representations - e.g., to increase interpretability of their results - probing tasks have been designed which query them for linguistic knowledge. However, designing probing tasks for lesser-resourced languages is tricky, because these often lack large-scale annotated data or (high-quality) dependency parsers as a prerequisite of probing task design in English. To investigate how to probe sentence embeddings in such cases, we investigate sensitivity of probing task results to structural design choices, conducting the first such large scale study. We show that design choices like size of the annotated probing dataset and type of classifier used for evaluation do (sometimes substantially) influence probing outcomes. We then probe embeddings in a multilingual setup with design choices that lie in a 'stable region', as we identify for English, and find that results on English do not transfer to other languages. Fairer and more comprehensive sentence-level probing evaluation should thus be carried out on multiple languages in the future.