arXiv Machine Learning

Analysing the Linearity of Linguistic Relations in Language Model Embedding Spaces

The paper introduces a framework to assess how linearly encoded linguistic relations are within language model embeddings. Using a constrained linear approximation on related and unrelated word pairs, the authors evaluate an extended BATS dataset across inflectional, derivational, lexicographic, and encyclopedic relations in GloVe, RoBERTa, and ModernBERT. Results show near-perfect linear encoding for inflectional and derivational relations, higher errors for lexicographic and encyclopedic relations—especially in one-to-many and many-to-many cases—and that RoBERTa and ModernBERT encode relations more linearly than GloVe.

arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Inductive Learning of Concept Embeddings from Cross-Linguistic Colexification Patterns with Textual Attributes

The paper introduces an inductive method for learning concept embeddings from cross‑linguistic colexification networks combined with short textual descriptions. Unlike previous transductive approaches, this framework can embed unseen concepts using only a brief definition. The resulting embeddings correlate with cross‑linguistic similarity measures and generalize well to new concepts.

By Arne Rubehn
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

CWoMP: Morpheme Representation Learning for Interlinear Glossing

CWoMP (Contrastive Word‑Morpheme Pretraining) is a new approach for generating interlinear glossed text that treats morphemes as atomic form‑meaning units with learned representations. It uses a contrastively trained encoder to align words in context with their constituent morphemes in a shared embedding space, and an autoregressive decoder that retrieves morpheme sequences from a mutable lexicon of these embeddings. The method yields interpretable predictions grounded in lexicon entries and allows users to improve results at inference time by expanding the lexicon without retraining, achieving superior performance and efficiency on diverse low‑resource languages, especially in extremely low‑resource settings.

By Morris Alper, Enora Rice, Bhargav Shandilya, Alexis Palmer, Lori Levin
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Cross-Lingual Alignment Without Joint Training: Do Monolingual Language Models Converge on Universal Representations?

The study investigates whether monolingual language models, trained without joint multilingual objectives, develop cross-lingual alignment. By evaluating models such as Goldfish and independently built monolingual systems, the authors find that alignable representational geometry emerges across layers, strengthening with larger data, larger models, or closer linguistic proximity. A single Procrustes rotation on parallel sentences can map hidden states between models, and applying this rotation to a German model’s residuals swaps factual predictions to those of the donor English model, demonstrating functional transfer.

By Ej Zhou, Suchir Salhan, Catherine Arnett, Anna Korhonen
arXiv AI
Sep 15

LLM-Microscope: Uncovering the Hidden Role of Punctuation in Context Memory of Transformers

The paper introduces LLM-Microscope, a toolkit for measuring how Large Language Models encode contextual information at the token level. It shows that seemingly minor tokens—such as determiners, stopwords, and punctuation—carry surprisingly high contextual weight, and removing them degrades performance on benchmarks like MMLU and BABILong-4k. The study also finds a strong link between contextualization and linearity, indicating that the transformation between layers can be approximated by a single linear mapping when tokens are well contextualized.

By Anton Razzhigaev, Matvey Mikhalchuk, Temurbek Rahmatullaev, Elizaveta Goncharova, Polina Druzhinina, Ivan Oseledets, Andrey Kuznetsov