Understanding or Memorizing? A Case Study of German Definite Articles in Language Models
Abstrak
Language models perform well on grammatical agreement, but it is unclear whether this reflects rule-based generalization or memorization. We study this question for German definite singular articles, whose forms depend on gender and case. Using GRADIEND, a gradient-based interpretability method, we learn parameter update directions for gender-case specific article transitions. We find that updates learned for a specific gender-case article transition frequently affect unrelated gender-case settings, with substantial overlap among the most affected neurons across settings. These results argue against a strictly rule-based encoding of German definite articles, indicating that models at least partly rely on memorized associations rather than abstract grammatical rules.
Penulis (3)
Jonathan Drechsel
Erisa Bytyqi
Steffen Herbold
Akses Cepat
- Tahun Terbit
- 2026
- Bahasa
- en
- Sumber Database
- arXiv
- Akses
- Open Access ✓