Dependency resolution at the syntax-semantics interface: psycholinguistic and computational insights on control dependencies
Iria de-Dios-Flores, Juan Pablo Garcia Amboage, Marcos Garcia
Main: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics Main-oral Paper
Session 5: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling, and Psycholinguistics (Oral)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 11, 16:15-17:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 5 (20:15-21:30 UTC)
Keywords:
linguistic theories, computational psycholinguistics
Languages:
spanish, galician
TLDR:
Using psycholinguistic and computational experiments we compare the ability of humans and several pre-trained masked language models to correctly identify control dependencies in Spanish sentences such as ‘José le prometió/ordenó a María ser ordenado/a' (‘Joseph promised/ordered Mary to be tidy'). T...
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Abstract:
Using psycholinguistic and computational experiments we compare the ability of humans and several pre-trained masked language models to correctly identify control dependencies in Spanish sentences such as ‘José le prometió/ordenó a María ser ordenado/a' (‘Joseph promised/ordered Mary to be tidy'). These structures underlie complex anaphoric and agreement relations at the interface of syntax and semantics, allowing us to study lexically-guided antecedent retrieval processes. Our results show that while humans correctly identify the (un)acceptability of the strings, language models often fail to identify the correct antecedent in non-adjacent dependencies, showing their reliance on linearity. Additional experiments on Galician reinforce these conclusions. Our findings are equally valuable for the evaluation of language models' ability to capture linguistic generalizations, as well as for psycholinguistic theories of anaphor resolution.