How Distributed are Distributed Representations? An Observation on the Locality of Syntactic Information in Verb Agreement Tasks

Bingzhi Li (1) , Guillaume Wisniewski (1) , Benoit Crabbé (1)

1 LLF - UMR7110 - Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle

This work addresses the question of the localization of the syntactic information that is encoded in the Transformers representations. We tackle this question from two perspectives, considering the object-past participle agreement in French, by identifying, first, in which part of the sentence and, second, in which part of the representation syntactic information is encoded. The results of our experiments using probing, causal analysis and feature selection method, show that syntactic information is encoded locally in a way consistent with the French grammar.

Domaines: Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Bingzhi Li, Guillaume Wisniewski, Benoit Crabbé. How Distributed are Distributed Representations? An Observation on the Locality of Syntactic Information in Verb Agreement Tasks. 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, May 2022, Dublin, France. pp.501-507, ⟨10.18653/v1/2022.acl-short.54⟩. ⟨halshs-03755082⟩