2023 Volume 30 Issue 2 Pages 664-688
We conducted a study to determine what kind of structural knowledge learned in neural network encoders is transferable to the processing of natural language. We designed artificial languages with structural properties that mimic those of natural language, pretrained encoders on the data, and examined the encoders' effects on downstream tasks in natural language. Our experimental results demonstrate the importance of statistical dependency, as well as the effectiveness of the nesting structure in implicit dependency relations. These results indicate that position-aware context dependence represents knowledge transferable across different languages.