@inproceedings{guerin-chemla-2023-bird,
    title = "It is a Bird Therefore it is a Robin: On {BERT}{'}s Internal Consistency Between Hypernym Knowledge and Logical Words",
    author = "Guerin, Nicolas  and
      Chemla, Emmanuel",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.560",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.560",
    pages = "8807--8817",
    abstract = "The lexical knowledge of NLP systems shouldbe tested (i) for their internal consistency(avoiding groundedness issues) and (ii) bothfor content words and logical words. In thispaper we propose a new method to test the understandingof the hypernymy relationship bymeasuring its antisymmetry according to themodels. Previous studies often rely only on thedirect question (e.g., A robin is a ...), where weargue a correct answer could only rely on collocationalcues, rather than hierarchical cues. We show how to control for this, and how it isimportant. We develop a method to ask similarquestions about logical words that encode anentailment-like relation (e.g., because or therefore).Our results show important weaknessesof BERT-like models on these semantic tasks.",
}

The lexical knowledge of NLP systems shouldbe tested (i) for their internal consistency(avoiding groundedness issues) and (ii) bothfor content words and logical words. In thispaper we propose a new method to test the understandingof the hypernymy relationship bymeasuring its antisymmetry according to themodels. Previous studies often rely only on thedirect question (e.g., A robin is a ...), where weargue a correct answer could only rely on collocationalcues, rather than hierarchical cues. We show how to control for this, and how it isimportant. We develop a method to ask similarquestions about logical words that encode anentailment-like relation (e.g., because or therefore).Our results show important weaknessesof BERT-like models on these semantic tasks.
Guerin, Nicolas Chemla, Emmanuel
It is a Bird Therefore it is a Robin: On BERT's Internal Consistency Between Hypernym Knowledge and Logical Words