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Negated and Misprimed Probes for Pretrained Language Models: Birds Can Talk, But Cannot Fly

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arxiv 1911.03343 v3 pith:SGPXGFJY submitted 2019-11-08 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords birdsplmsmaskcannotclozefactualfindknowledge
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Building on Petroni et al. (2019), we propose two new probing tasks analyzing factual knowledge stored in Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). (1) Negation. We find that PLMs do not distinguish between negated ("Birds cannot [MASK]") and non-negated ("Birds can [MASK]") cloze questions. (2) Mispriming. Inspired by priming methods in human psychology, we add "misprimes" to cloze questions ("Talk? Birds can [MASK]"). We find that PLMs are easily distracted by misprimes. These results suggest that PLMs still have a long way to go to adequately learn human-like factual knowledge.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Propositional Logic for Probing Generalization in Neural Networks

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Standard neural architectures generalize to unseen variable and operator combinations, but systematically fail when negation is applied to an operator that was hidden during training.

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