Decoding Symbolism in Language Models

Abstract

This work explores the feasibility of eliciting knowledge from language models (LMs) to decode symbolism, recognizing something (e.g., roses) as a stand-in for another (e.g., love). We present our evaluative framework, Symbolism Analysis (SymbA), which compares LMs (e.g., RoBERTa, GPT-J) on different types of symbolism and analyzes the outcomes along multiple metrics. Our findings suggest that conventional symbols are more reliably elicited from LMs while situated symbols are more challenging. Results also reveal the negative impact of the bias in pre-trained corpora. We further demonstrate that a simple re-ranking strategy can mitigate the bias and significantly improve model performances to be on par with human performances in some cases.