This is one of those early works interpreting BERT from the point of view of linguistics. Their work shows that the lower, middle and higher layers capture surface, syntactic and semantic features respectively. Their findings agree with the learning mechanism underlying Transformer. An attention head can only aggregate information between two tokens which is not enough to understand complex structures. To enable that, Transformer stacks multi-layers of attention heads together which introduces higher-order attention in higher layers.
Overall Recommendation
- 5: Transformative: This paper is likely to change our field. It should be considered for a best paper award.
- 4.5: Exciting: It changed my thinking on this topic. I would fight for it to be accepted.
- 4: Strong: I learned a lot from it. I would like to see it accepted.
- 3.5: Leaning positive: It can be accepted more or less in its current form. However, the work it describes is not particularly exciting and/or inspiring, so it will not be a big loss if people don’t see it in this conference.
- 3: Ambivalent: It has merits (e.g., it reports state-of-the-art results, the idea is nice), but there are key weaknesses (e.g., I didn’t learn much from it, evaluation is not convincing, it describes incremental work). I believe it can significantly benefit from another round of revision, but I won’t object to accepting it if my co-reviewers are willing to champion it.
- 2.5: Leaning negative: I am leaning towards rejection, but I can be persuaded if my co-reviewers think otherwise.
- 2: Mediocre: I would rather not see it in the conference.
- 1.5: Weak: I am pretty confident that it should be rejected.
- 1: Poor: I would fight to have it rejected.