Assessing BERT's Syntactic Abilities
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
The extent to which the recently introduced BERT model captures English syntactic phenomena is assessed, using naturally-occurring subject-verb agreement stimuli; "coloreless green ideas" subject- Verb Agreement stimuli; and manually crafted stimuli for subject- verb agreement and reflexive anaphora phenomena.
Abstract
I assess the extent to which the recently introduced BERT model captures English syntactic phenomena, using (1) naturally-occurring subject-verb agreement stimuli; (2) "coloreless green ideas" subject-verb agreement stimuli, in which content words in natural sentences are randomly replaced with words sharing the same part-of-speech and inflection; and (3) manually crafted stimuli for subject-verb agreement and reflexive anaphora phenomena. The BERT model performs remarkably well on all cases.