Is "my favorite new movie" my favorite movie? Probing the Understanding of Recursive Noun Phrases

Recursive noun phrases (NPs) have interesting semantic properties. For example, "my favorite new movie" is not necessarily "my favorite movie", whereas "my new favorite movie" is. This is common sense to humans, yet it is unknown whether pre-trained language models have such knowledge. We introduce the Recursive Noun Phrase Challenge (RNPC), a challenge set targeting the understanding of recursive NPs. When evaluated on our dataset, state-of-the-art Transformer models only achieve around chance performance. Still, we show that such knowledge is learnable with appropriate data. We further probe the models for relevant linguistic features that can be learned from our tasks, including modifier semantic category and modifier scope. Finally, models trained on RNPC achieve strong zero-shot performance on an extrinsic Harm Detection task, showing the usefulness of the understanding of recursive NPs in downstream applications. All code and data will be released at https://github.com/veronica320/Recursive-NPs.