Is "My Favorite New Movie" My Favorite Movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases

Abstract

Recursive noun phrases (NPs) have interesting semantic properties. For example, my favorite new movie is not necessarily my favorite movie, whereas my new favorite movie is. This is common sense to humans, yet it is unknown whether language models have such knowledge. We introduce the Recursive Noun Phrase Challenge (RNPC), a challenge set targeting the understanding of recursive NPs. When evaluated on our dataset, stateof-the-art Transformer models only achieve around chance performance. Still, we show that such knowledge is learnable with appropriate data. We further probe the models for relevant linguistic features that can be learned from our tasks, including modifier semantic category and modifier scope. Finally, models trained on RNPC achieve strong zero-shot performance on an extrinsic Harm Detection task, showing the usefulness of the understanding of recursive NPs in downstream applications. 1