Alhassan Abdelhalim


2024

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Detecting Conceptual Abstraction in LLMs
Michaela Regneri | Alhassan Abdelhalim | Soeren Laue
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

We show a novel approach to detecting noun abstraction within a large language model (LLM). Starting from a psychologically motivated set of noun pairs in taxonomic relationships, we instantiate surface patterns indicating hypernymy and analyze the attention matrices produced by BERT. We compare the results to two sets of counterfactuals and show that we can detect hypernymy in the abstraction mechanism, which cannot solely be related to the distributional similarity of noun pairs. Our findings are a first step towards the explainability of conceptual abstraction in LLMs.