Word-order typology in Multilingual BERT: A case study in subordinate-clause detection. (arXiv:2205.11987v1 [cs.CL])

The capabilities and limitations of BERT and similar models are still unclear
when it comes to learning syntactic abstractions, in particular across
languages. In this paper, we use the task of subordinate-clause detection
within and across languages to probe these properties. We show that this task
is deceptively simple, with easy gains offset by a long tail of harder cases,
and that BERT's zero-shot performance is dominated by word-order effects,
mirroring the SVO/VSO/SOV typology.

arxiv bert case case study detection study