Source Themes

Testing the Effectiveness of the Diagnostic Probing Paradigm on Italian Treebanks

The outstanding performance recently reached by neural language models (NLMs) across many natural language processing (NLP) tasks has steered the debate towards understanding whether NLMs implicitly learn linguistic competence. Probes, i.e., …

On Robustness and Sensitivity of a Neural Language Model: A Case Study on Italian L1 Learner Errors

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive linguistic study aimed at assessing the implicit behaviour of one of the most prominent Neural Language Model (NLM) based on Transformer architectures, BERT (Devlin et al., 2019), when dealing with a …

Evaluating Text-To-Text Framework for Topic and Style Classification of Italian texts

In this paper, we propose an extensive evaluation of the first text-to-text Italian Neural Language Model (NLM), IT5, on a classification scenario. In particular, we test the performance of IT5 on several tasks involving both the classification of …

Probing Linguistic Knowledge in Italian Neural Language Models across Language Varieties

In this paper, we present an in-depth investigation of the linguistic knowledge encoded by the transformer models currently available for the Italian language. In particular, we investigate how the complexity of two different architectures of probing …

Punctuation Restoration in Spoken Italian Transcripts with Transformers

In this paper, we propose an evaluation of a Transformer-based punctuation restoration model for the Italian language. Experimenting with a BERT-base model, we perform several fine-tuning with different training data and sizes and tested them in an …

Tracking Linguistic Abilities in Neural Language Models

In the last few years, the analysis of the inner workings of state-of-the-art Neural Language Models (NLMs) has become one of the most addressed line of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Several techniques have been devised to obtain …

On the role of Textual Connectives in Sentence Comprehension: a new Dataset for Italian

In this paper we present a new evaluation resource for Italian aimed at assessing the role of textual connectives in the comprehension of the meaning of a sentence. The resource is arranged in two sections (acceptability assessment and cloze test), …

Probing Tasks Under Pressure

Probing tasks are frequently used to evaluate whether the representations of Neural Language Models (NLMs) encode linguistic information. However, it is still questioned if probing classification tasks really enable such investigation or they simply …

Evaluating Transformer Models for Punctuation Restoration in Italian

In this paper, we propose an evaluation of a Transformer-based punctuation restoration model for the Italian language. Experimenting with a BERT-base model, we perform several fine-tuning with different training data and sizes and tested them in an …

How Do BERT Embeddings Organize Linguistic Knowledge?

Several studies investigated the linguistic information implicitly encoded in Neural Language Models. Most of these works focused on quantifying the amount and type of information available within their internal representations and across their …