Source Themes

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 …

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 …