Abstract: Analysing whether neural language models encode linguistic information has become popular in NLP. One method of doing so, which is frequently cited to support the claim that models like BERT encode syntax, is called probing; probes are small supervised models trained to extract linguistic information from another model's output. If a probe is able to predict a particular structure, it is argued that the model whose output it is trained on must have implicitly learnt to encode it. However, drawing a generalisation about a model's linguistic know...
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