  In this paper, we attempt to link the inner workings of a neural language
model to linguistic theory, focusing on a complex phenomenon well discussed in
formal linguis- tics: (negative) polarity items. We briefly discuss the leading
hypotheses about the licensing contexts that allow negative polarity items and
evaluate to what extent a neural language model has the ability to correctly
process a subset of such constructions. We show that the model finds a relation
between the licensing context and the negative polarity item and appears to be
aware of the scope of this context, which we extract from a parse tree of the
sentence. With this research, we hope to pave the way for other studies linking
formal linguistics to deep learning.
