Are Transformers a Modern Version of ELIZA? Observations on French Object Verb Agreement

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10133v1
• Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2021 12:33:11 GMT
• Title: Are Transformers a Modern Version of ELIZA? Observations on French Object Verb Agreement
• Abstract summary: We show that it is possible to achieve high accuracy on this agreement task with simple surfaces. Our fine-grained analyses of results on the long-range French object-verb agreement show that contrary to LSTMs, Transformers are able to capture a non-trivial amount of grammatical structure.
• Score: 5.448283690603357
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Many recent works have demonstrated that unsupervised sentence representations of neural networks encode syntactic information by observing that neural language models are able to predict the agreement between a verb and its subject. We take a critical look at this line of research by showing that it is possible to achieve high accuracy on this agreement task with simple surface heuristics, indicating a possible flaw in our assessment of neural networks' syntactic ability. Our fine-grained analyses of results on the long-range French object-verb agreement show that contrary to LSTMs, Transformers are able to capture a non-trivial amount of grammatical structure.

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