On Quick Kisses and How to Make Them Count: A Study on Event Construal in Light Verb Constructions with BERT

Chenxin Liu, Emmanuele Chersoni


Abstract
Psycholinguistic studies suggested that our mental perception of events depends not only on the lexical items used to describe them, but also on the syntactic structure of the event description. More specifically, it has been argued that light verb constructions affect the perception of duration in event construal, such that the same event in this type of constructions is perceived by humans as taking less time (to give a kiss takes a shorter time than to kiss). In our paper, we present two experiments with BERT using English stimuli from psycholinguistic studies to investigate the effects of the syntactic construction on event duration and event similarity. We show that i) the dimensions of BERT vectors encode a smaller value for duration for both punctive and durative events in count syntax, in line with human results; on the other hand, we also found that ii) BERT semantic similarity fails to capture the conceptual shift that durative events should undergo in count syntax.
Anthology ID:
2023.blackboxnlp-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Yonatan Belinkov, Sophie Hao, Jaap Jumelet, Najoung Kim, Arya McCarthy, Hosein Mohebbi
Venues:
BlackboxNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
367–378
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.blackboxnlp-1.28
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.blackboxnlp-1.28
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chenxin Liu and Emmanuele Chersoni. 2023. On Quick Kisses and How to Make Them Count: A Study on Event Construal in Light Verb Constructions with BERT. In Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP, pages 367–378, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On Quick Kisses and How to Make Them Count: A Study on Event Construal in Light Verb Constructions with BERT (Liu & Chersoni, BlackboxNLP-WS 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.blackboxnlp-1.28.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.blackboxnlp-1.28.mp4