The Hidden Folk: Linguistic Properties Encoded in Multilingual Contextual Character Representations

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To gain a better understanding of the linguistic information encoded in character-based language models, we probe the multilingual contextual CANINE model. We design a range of phonetic probing tasks in six Nordic languages, including Faroese as an additional zero-shot instance. We observe that some phonetic information is indeed encoded in the character representations, as consonants and vowels can be well distinguished using a linear classifier. Furthermore, results for the Danish and Norwegian language seem to be worse for the consonant/vowel distinction in comparison to other languages. The information encoded in these representations can also be learned in a zero-shot scenario, as Faroese shows a reasonably good performance in the same vowel/consonant distinction task.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL 2023)
Place of PublicationToronto
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2023
Pages6-13
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2023

ID: 374969148