{"doi":"10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.429","title":"How does BERT’s attention change when you fine-tune? An analysis methodology and a case study in negation scope","abstract":"Large pretrained language models like BERT, after fine-tuning to a downstream task, have achieved high performance on a variety of NLP problems. Yet explaining their decisions is difficult despite recent work probing their internal representations. We propose a procedure and analysis methods that take a hypothesis of how a transformer-based model might encode a linguistic phenomenon, and test the validity of that hypothesis based on a comparison between knowledge-related downstream tasks with downstream control tasks, and measurement of cross-dataset consistency. We apply this methodology to test BERT and RoBERTa on a hypothesis that some attention heads will consistently attend from a word in negation scope to the negation cue. We find that after fine-tuning BERT and RoBERTa on a negation scope task, the average attention head improves its sensitivity to negation and its attention consistency across negation datasets compared to the pre-trained models. However, only the base models (not the large models) improve compared to a control task, indicating there is evidence for a shallow encoding of negation only in the base models.","journal":null,"year":2020,"id":118913,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":35,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9441,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":318128,"name":"Steven Bethard","orcid":"0000-0001-9560-6491","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":552388,"name":"Yiyun Zhao","orcid":"0000-0001-8280-8270","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":23,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:14:03.409507Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}