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What Makes My Model Perplexed? A Linguistic Investigation on Neural Language Models Perplexity

This paper presents an investigation aimed at studying how the linguistic structure of a sentence affects the perplexity of two of the most popular Neural Language Models (NLMs), BERT and GPT-2. We first compare the sentence-level likelihood computed …

A dissemination workshop for introducing young Italian students to NLP

We describe and make available the game-based material developed for a laboratory run at several Italian science festivals to popularize NLP among young students.

Teaching NLP with Bracelets and Restaurant Menus: An Interactive Workshop for Italian Students

Although Natural Language Processing (NLP) is at the core of many tools young people use in their everyday life, high school curricula (in Italy) do not include any computational linguistics education. This lack of exposure makes the use of such …

A NLP-based stylometric approach for tracking the evolution of L1 written language compentece

In this study we present a Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based stylometric approach for tracking the evolution of written language competence in Italian L1 learners. The approach relies on a wide set of linguistically motivated features capturing …

Is Neural Language Model Perplexity Related to Readability?

This paper explores the relationship between Neural Language Model (NLM) perplexity and sentence readability. Starting from the evidence that NLMs implicitly acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from a huge amount of training data, our goal is …

Italian Transformers Under the Linguistic Lens

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 whether and how using different architectures of probing …

PRELEARN @ EVALITA 2020: Overview of the Prerequisite Relation Learning Task for Italian

The Prerequisite Relation Learning (PRELEARN) task is the EVALITA 2020 shared task on concept prerequisite learning, which consists of classifying prerequisite relations between pairs of concepts distinguishing between prerequisite pairs and …

ATE_ABSITA @ EVALITA2020: Overview of the Aspect Term Extraction and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Task

Over the last years, the rise of novel sentiment analysis techniques to assess aspect-based opinions on product reviews has become a key component for providing valuable insights to both consumers and businesses. To this extent, we propose ATE …

Linguistic Profiling of a Neural Language Model

In this paper we investigate the linguistic knowledge learned by a Neural Language Model (NLM) before and after a fine-tuning process and how this knowledge affects its predictions during several classification problems. We use a wide set of probing …

Contextual and Non-Contextual Word Embeddings: an in-depth Linguistic Investigation

In this paper we present a comparison between the linguistic knowledge encoded in the internal representations of a contextual Language Model (BERT) and a contextual-independent one (Word2vec). We use a wide set of probing tasks, each of which …