Linguistic Features in German BERT: The Role of Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics in Multi-Class Text Classification

Abstract

Most studies on the linguistic information encoded by BERT primarily focus on English. Our study examines a monolingual German BERT model using a semantic classification task on newspaper articles, analysing the linguistic features influencing classification decisions through SHAP values. We use the TüBa-D/Z corpus, a resource with gold-standard annotations for a set of linguistic features, including POS, inflectional morphology, phrasal, clausal, and dependency structures. Semantic features of nouns are evaluated via the GermaNet ontology using shared hypernyms. Our results indicate that the features identified in English also affect classification in German but suggests important language- and task-specific features as well.