Analysis methods which enable us to better understand the representations and
functioning of neural models of language are increasingly needed as deep
learning becomes the dominant approach in NLP. Here we present two methods
based on Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) and Tree Kernels (TK) which
allow us to directly quantify how strongly the information encoded in neural
activation patterns corresponds to information represented by symbolic
structures such as syntax trees. We first validate our methods on the case of a
simple synthetic language for arithmetic expressions with clearly defined
syntax and semantics, and show that they exhibit the expected pattern of
results. We then apply our methods to correlate neural representations of
English sentences with their constituency parse trees.Comment: ACL 201