arXiv AI By Grayson Wycliffe Storer, Julia Witte Zimmerman

Contextual trajectory and incremental contextual displacement: Towards using LLMs to understand dynamic, utterance-specific meaning construction

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The paper introduces token‑wise incremental trajectories, a method that tracks how contextual word embeddings evolve as each word is added to a sentence. Using garden‑path sentences, the authors show that these trajectories capture known processing disruptions and can distinguish ambiguous sentences from disambiguated controls. They propose metrics for measuring representational displacement and find that ambiguity signals are present not only in sentence‑level CLS vectors but also in individual token embeddings, suggesting distributed meaning construction across scales.

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