Word embeddings have advanced the state of the art in NLP across numerous tasks. Understanding the contents of dense neural representations is of utmost interest to the computational semantics community. We propose to focus on relating these opaque word vectors with human-readable definitions, as found in dictionaries. This problem naturally divides into two subtasks: converting definitions into embeddings, and converting embeddings into definitions. This task was conducted in a multilingual setting, using comparable sets of embeddings trained homogeneously.
Pretrained embeddings based on the Transformer architecture have taken the NLP community by storm. We show that they can mathematically be reframed as a sum of vector factors and showcase how to use this reframing to study the impact of each component. We provide evidence that multi-head attentions and feed-forwards are not equally useful in all downstream applications, as well as a quantitative overview of the effects of finetuning on the overall embedding space. This approach allows us to draw connections to a wide range of previous studies, from vector space anisotropy to attention weights.
Word embeddings have advanced the state of the art in NLP across numerous tasks. Understanding the contents of dense neural representations is of utmost interest to the computational semantics community. We propose to focus on relating these opaque word vectors with human-readable definitions, as found in dictionaries. This problem naturally divides into two subtasks: converting definitions into embeddings, and converting embeddings into definitions. This task was conducted in a multilingual setting, using comparable sets of embeddings trained homogeneously.
What we are fishing forWhat is in a word embedding? Are word embeddings semantic descriptions, in the same sense that
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