Probing Character-level Transformers for the Spanish L-shaped Morphome
When a transformer learns an irregular morphological pattern, what has it learned? Our test case is the Spanish \emph{L-shaped morphome}, a complex irregular pattern in which the verb's stem alternates in exactly the first-person singular indicative and all subjunctive forms, and whose membership no phonological, semantic, or syntactic feature predicts. Prior studies have shown that character-level transformers can reproduce this pattern, but that evidence describes what models produce, not what they represent. Probing five architectures, twelve trained models each, under lemma-disjoint cross-validation with controls and surface baselines, we show that the models encode the L-shaped class...
| Authors | Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao, Kevin Tang, Wiebke Petersen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 August 2026 |
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