@inproceedings{de-dios-flores-etal-2023-dependency,
    title = "Dependency resolution at the syntax-semantics interface: psycholinguistic and computational insights on control dependencies",
    author = "de-Dios-Flores, Iria  and
      Garcia Amboage, Juan  and
      Garcia, Marcos",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.12",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.12",
    pages = "203--222",
    abstract = "Using psycholinguistic and computational experiments we compare the ability of humans and several pre-trained masked language models to correctly identify control dependencies in Spanish sentences such as {`}Jos{\'e} le prometi{\'o}/orden{\'o} a Mar{\'\i}a ser ordenado/a{'} ({`}Joseph promised/ordered Mary to be tidy{'}). These structures underlie complex anaphoric and agreement relations at the interface of syntax and semantics, allowing us to study lexically-guided antecedent retrieval processes. Our results show that while humans correctly identify the (un)acceptability of the strings, language models often fail to identify the correct antecedent in non-adjacent dependencies, showing their reliance on linearity. Additional experiments on Galician reinforce these conclusions. Our findings are equally valuable for the evaluation of language models{'} ability to capture linguistic generalizations, as well as for psycholinguistic theories of anaphor resolution.",
}

Using psycholinguistic and computational experiments we compare the ability of humans and several pre-trained masked language models to correctly identify control dependencies in Spanish sentences such as {`}Jos{\'e} le prometi{\'o}/orden{\'o} a Mar{\'\i}a ser ordenado/a{'} ({`}Joseph promised/ordered Mary to be tidy{'}). These structures underlie complex anaphoric and agreement relations at the interface of syntax and semantics, allowing us to study lexically-guided antecedent retrieval processes. Our results show that while humans correctly identify the (un)acceptability of the strings, language models often fail to identify the correct antecedent in non-adjacent dependencies, showing their reliance on linearity. Additional experiments on Galician reinforce these conclusions. Our findings are equally valuable for the evaluation of language models{'} ability to capture linguistic generalizations, as well as for psycholinguistic theories of anaphor resolution.
de-Dios-Flores, Iria Garcia Amboage, Juan Garcia, Marcos
Dependency resolution at the syntax-semantics interface: psycholinguistic and computational insights on control dependencies