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arXiv · 2203.00633

Transformer Grammars: Augmenting Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Inductive Biases at Scale

Laurent Sartran·Samuel Barrett·Adhiguna Kuncoro·Miloš Stanojević·Phil Blunsom·Chris Dyer
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Abstract

We introduce Transformer Grammars (TGs), a novel class of Transformer language models that combine (i) the expressive power, scalability, and strong performance of Transformers and (ii) recursive syntactic compositions, which here are implemented through a special attention mask and deterministic transformation of the linearized tree. We find that TGs outperform various strong baselines on sentence-level language modeling perplexity, as well as on multiple syntax-sensitive language modeling evaluation metrics. Additionally, we find that the recursive syntactic composition bottleneck which represents each sentence as a single vector harms perplexity on document-level language modeling, providing evidence that a different kind of memory mechanism -- one that is independent of composed syntactic representations -- plays an important role in current successful models of long text.

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Laurent Sartran, Samuel Barrett, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Miloš Stanojević, Phil Blunsom, Chris Dyer. 2022-03-01. Transformer Grammars: Augmenting Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Inductive Biases at Scale. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl_a_00526

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