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

Abstract

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 with BERT and the GPT-2’s perplexity showing that the two metrics are correlated. In addition, we exploit linguistic features capturing a wide set of morpho-syntactic and syntactic phenomena showing how they contribute to predict the perplexity of the two NLMs.