UoR-NCL at SemEval-2022 Task 3: Fine-Tuning the BERT-Based Models for Validating Taxonomic Relations

In human languages, there are many presuppositional constructions that impose a constrain on the taxonomic relations between two nouns depending on their order. These constructions create a challenge in validating taxonomic relations in real-world contexts. In SemEval2022-Task3 Presupposed Taxonomies: Evaluating Neural Network Semantics (PreTENS), the organizers introduced a task regarding validating the taxonomic relations within a variety of presuppositional constructions. This task is divided into two subtasks: classification and regression. Each subtask contains three datasets in multiple languages, i.e., English, Italian and French. To tackle this task, this work proposes to fine-tune different BERT-based models pre-trained on different languages. According to the experimental results, the fine-tuned BERT-based models are effective compared to the baselines in classification. For regression, the fine-tuned models show promising performance with the possibility of improvement.