Controlled Evaluation of Syntactic Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models
The result's identifiers
Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F26%3A7ISFHQSK" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/26:7ISFHQSK - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
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DOI - Digital Object Identifier
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Alternative languages
Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Controlled Evaluation of Syntactic Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models
Original language description
Language models (LMs) are capable of acquiring elements of human-like syntactic knowledge. Targeted syntactic evaluation tests have been employed to measure how well they form generalizations about syntactic phenomena in high-resource languages such as English. However, we still lack a thorough understanding of LMs’ capacity for syntactic generalizations in low-resource languages, which are responsible for much of the diversity of syntactic patterns worldwide. In this study, we develop targeted syntactic evaluation tests for three low-resource languages (Basque, Hindi, and Swahili) and use them to evaluate five families of open-access multilingual Transformer LMs. We find that some syntactic tasks prove relatively easy for LMs while others (agreement in sentences containing indirect objects in Basque, agreement across a prepositional phrase in Swahili) are challenging. We additionally uncover issues with publicly available Transformers, including a bias toward the habitual aspect in Hindi in multilingual BERT and underperformance compared to similar-sized models in XGLM4.5B. © 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Classification
Type
D - Article in proceedings
CEP classification
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OECD FORD branch
10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)
Result continuities
Project
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Continuities
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Others
Publication year
2025
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů
Data specific for result type
Article name in the collection
Proc. Main Conf. Int. Conf. Comput. Linguist., COLING
ISBN
979-8-89176-215-2
ISSN
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e-ISSN
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Number of pages
12
Pages from-to
402-413
Publisher name
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Place of publication
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Event location
Abu Dhabi
Event date
Jan 1, 2026
Type of event by nationality
WRD - Celosvětová akce
UT code for WoS article
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