AI RESEARCH
Probing Minimalist Phase Structure in LLMs: What Universal Dependencies Cannot Represent
arXiv CS.CL
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ArXi:2605.26431v1 Announce Type: new Structural probes train on Universal Dependencies (UD), which does not encode formal-syntactic abstractions such as phase boundaries or phase-internal cohesion. Whether large language models (LLMs) encode these remains an open question that UD-based probing cannot answer by construction. We evaluate structural probes on wh-movement stimuli where UD distances are invariant across conditions by design -- any non-zero effect therefore reflects structure beyond UD.