How Distributed are Distributed Representations? An Observation on the Locality of Syntactic Information in Verb Agreement Tasks

AbstractThis work addresses the question of the localization of syntactic information encoded in the transformers representations. We tackle this question from two perspectives, considering the object-past participle agreement in French, by identifying, first, in which part of the sentence and, second, in which part of the representation the syntactic information is encoded. The results of our experiments, using probing, causal analysis and feature selection method, show that syntactic information is encoded locally in a way consistent with the French grammar.