{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/investigating-semantic-subspaces-of","title":"Investigating semantic subspaces of Transformer sentence embeddings through linear structural probing","arxiv_id":"2310.11923","date":"2023-10-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Dmitry Nikolaev","Sebastian Padó"],"abstract":"The question of what kinds of linguistic information are encoded in different layers of Transformer-based language models is of considerable interest for the NLP community. Existing work, however, has overwhelmingly focused on word-level representations and encoder-only language models with the masked-token training objective. In this paper, we present experiments with semantic structural probing, a method for studying sentence-level representations via finding a subspace of the embedding space that provides suitable task-specific pairwise distances between data-points. We apply our method to language models from different families (encoder-only, decoder-only, encoder-decoder) and of different sizes in the context of two tasks, semantic textual similarity and natural-language inference. We find that model families differ substantially in their performance and layer dynamics, but that the results are largely model-size invariant.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11923v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.11923v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"investigating-semantic-subspaces-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/macleginn/semantic-subspaces-code","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"natural-language-inference","task_name":"Natural Language Inference"},{"task_slug":"semantic-textual-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Textual Similarity"},{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"},{"task_slug":"sentence-embeddings","task_name":"Sentence Embeddings"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.11923","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}