A Benchmark for Hindi Verb-Argument Structure Alternations

摘要

In this paper we introduce a Hindi verb alternations benchmark to investigate whether pretrained large language models (LLMs) can infer the frame-selectional properties of Hindi verbs. Our benchmark consists of minimal pairs such as ‘Tina cut the wood’/*‘Tina disappeared the wood’. We create four variants of these alternations for Hindi to test knowledge of verbal morphology and argument case-marking. Our results show that a masked monolingual model performs the best, while causal models fare poorly. We further test the quality of the predictions using a cloze-style sentence completion task. While the models appear to infer the right mapping between verbal morphology and valency in the acceptability task, they do not generate the right verbal morphology in the cloze task. The model completions also lack pragmatic and world knowledge, crucial for making generalizations about verbal alternations. Our work points towards the need for more cross-linguistic research of verbal alternations.