Analyzing Linguistic Knowledge in Sequential Model of Sentence

Sentence modelling is a fundamental topic in computational linguistics. Recently, deep learning-based sequential models of sentence, such as recurrent neural network, have proved to be effective in dealing with the non-sequential properties of human language. However, little is known about how a recurrent neural network captures linguistic knowledge. Here we propose to correlate the neuron activation pattern of a LSTM language model with rich language features at sequential, lexical and compositional level. Qualitative visualization as well as quantitative analysis under multilingual perspective reveals the effectiveness of gate neurons and indicates that LSTM learns to allow different neurons selectively respond to linguistic knowledge at different levels. Cross-language evidence shows that the model captures different aspects of linguistic properties for different languages due to the variance of syntactic complexity. Additionally, we analyze the influence of modelling strategy on linguistic knowledge encoded implicitly in different sequential models.