What can Neural Referential Form Selectors Learn?

Despite achieving encouraging results, neural Referring Expression Generation models are often thought to lack transparency. We probed neural Referential Form Selection (RFS) models to find out to what extent the linguistic features influencing the RE form are learnt and captured by state-of-the-art RFS models. The results of 8 probing tasks show that all the defined features were learnt to some extent. The probing tasks pertaining to referential status and syntactic position exhibited the highest performance. The lowest performance was achieved by the probing models designed to predict discourse structure properties beyond the sentence level.