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Kanishka Misra

Kanishka Misra contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Targeted Linguistic Analysis of Sign Language Models with Minimal Translation Pairs

Models of sign language have historically lagged behind those for spoken language (text and speech). Recent work has greatly improved their performance on tasks like sign language translation and isolated sign recognition. However, it remains unclear to what extent existing models capture various linguistic phenomena of sign language, and how well they use cues from the multiple articulators used in sign language (hands, upper body, face). We introduce a new benchmark dataset for American Sign Language, ASL Minimal Translation Pairs (ASL-MTP), divided into multiple types of sign language phenomena and corresponding minimal pairs of translations, for performing such linguistic analyses. As a case study, we use ASL-MTP to analyze a state-of-the-art ASL-to-English translation model. We conduct a targeted analysis of the model by ablating various input cues during training and inference and evaluating on the phenomena in ASL-MTP. Our results show that, while the model performs above chance level on most of the phenomena, it relies strongly on manual cues while often missing crucial non-manual cues.

preprint2022arXiv

A Property Induction Framework for Neural Language Models

To what extent can experience from language contribute to our conceptual knowledge? Computational explorations of this question have shed light on the ability of powerful neural language models (LMs) -- informed solely through text input -- to encode and elicit information about concepts and properties. To extend this line of research, we present a framework that uses neural-network language models (LMs) to perform property induction -- a task in which humans generalize novel property knowledge (has sesamoid bones) from one or more concepts (robins) to others (sparrows, canaries). Patterns of property induction observed in humans have shed considerable light on the nature and organization of human conceptual knowledge. Inspired by this insight, we use our framework to explore the property inductions of LMs, and find that they show an inductive preference to generalize novel properties on the basis of category membership, suggesting the presence of a taxonomic bias in their representations.

preprint2022arXiv

minicons: Enabling Flexible Behavioral and Representational Analyses of Transformer Language Models

We present minicons, an open source library that provides a standard API for researchers interested in conducting behavioral and representational analyses of transformer-based language models (LMs). Specifically, minicons enables researchers to apply analysis methods at two levels: (1) at the prediction level -- by providing functions to efficiently extract word/sentence level probabilities; and (2) at the representational level -- by also facilitating efficient extraction of word/phrase level vectors from one or more layers. In this paper, we describe the library and apply it to two motivating case studies: One focusing on the learning dynamics of the BERT architecture on relative grammatical judgments, and the other on benchmarking 23 different LMs on zero-shot abductive reasoning. minicons is available at https://github.com/kanishkamisra/minicons

preprint2021arXiv

Exploring Lexical Irregularities in Hypothesis-Only Models of Natural Language Inference

Natural Language Inference (NLI) or Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) is the task of predicting the entailment relation between a pair of sentences (premise and hypothesis). This task has been described as a valuable testing ground for the development of semantic representations, and is a key component in natural language understanding evaluation benchmarks. Models that understand entailment should encode both, the premise and the hypothesis. However, experiments by Poliak et al. revealed a strong preference of these models towards patterns observed only in the hypothesis, based on a 10 dataset comparison. Their results indicated the existence of statistical irregularities present in the hypothesis that bias the model into performing competitively with the state of the art. While recast datasets provide large scale generation of NLI instances due to minimal human intervention, the papers that generate them do not provide fine-grained analysis of the potential statistical patterns that can bias NLI models. In this work, we analyze hypothesis-only models trained on one of the recast datasets provided in Poliak et al. for word-level patterns. Our results indicate the existence of potential lexical biases that could contribute to inflating the model performance.