{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/probing-for-multilingual-numerical","title":"Probing for Multilingual Numerical Understanding in Transformer-Based Language Models","arxiv_id":"2010.06666","date":"2020-10-13","proceeding":"EMNLP (BlackboxNLP) 2020 11","authors":["Devin Johnson","Denise Mak","Drew Barker","Lexi Loessberg-Zahl"],"abstract":"Natural language numbers are an example of compositional structures, where larger numbers are composed of operations on smaller numbers. Given that compositional reasoning is a key to natural language understanding, we propose novel multilingual probing tasks tested on DistilBERT, XLM, and BERT to investigate for evidence of compositional reasoning over numerical data in various natural language number systems. By using both grammaticality judgment and value comparison classification tasks in English, Japanese, Danish, and French, we find evidence that the information encoded in these pretrained models' embeddings is sufficient for grammaticality judgments but generally not for value comparisons. We analyze possible reasons for this and discuss how our tasks could be extended in further studies.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06666v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.06666v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"probing-for-multilingual-numerical","repo_url":"https://github.com/dj1121/tlm_num_probe","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"natural-language-understanding","task_name":"Natural Language Understanding"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"bpe","method_name":"BPE"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"distilbert","method_name":"DistilBERT"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"},{"method_slug":"xlm","method_name":"XLM"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2010.06666","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}