The paradox of the compositionality of natural language: a neural machine translation case study

This repository contains the data and evaluation scripts for the following paper:

@inproceedings{dankers2022paradox,
  title={The Paradox of the Compositionality of Natural Language: A Neural Machine Translation Case Study},
  author={Dankers, Verna and Bruni, Elia and Hupkes, Dieuwke},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  pages={4154--4175},
  year={2022}
}

In this paper, we present tests to evaluate compositionality "in the wild". As a case study, we consider the compositional behaviour of English-Dutch NMT models. This repository contains five folders, with their own READMEs:

• data: this folder contains the generated src files for the data types of synthetic and semi-natural that form the backbone of our tests, along with the vocabulary used to generate the synthetic data templates.
• overgeneralisation: this folder contains synthethic, semi-natural and natural data with idioms, used to assess if a model overgeneralises or provides an idiomatic translation.
• substitutivity: this folder contains English data with synonym replacements for the synthetic, semi-natural and natural data templates.
• systematicity: this folder contains synthetic and semi-natural data used to assess systematicity of recombinations of noun and verb phrases (s_np_vp) and sentences with a conjunction (s_conj). For the latter setup, there is natural data too.
• scripts: This folder contains various scripts that facilitate using the data.

Usage

• If you are curious about our synthetic, semi-natural and natural data sources (see Section 3 of the paper), go to the data folder.
• If you are looking to run a specific test, go to the folder of the experiment of interest:
  1. For Section 4.1 / systematicity, go to systematicity.
  2. For Section 4.2 / substitutivity, go to substitutivity.
  3. For Section 4.2 / global compositionality, go to overgeneralisation.
• If you would like to use our evaluation or visualisation scripts, go to scripts.

Note that the models referred to as small, medium and full in the paper are referred to as tiny, small, all in the repository.