{"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/putting-words-in-berts-mouth-navigating","title":"Putting Words in BERT’s Mouth: Navigating Contextualized Vector Spaces with Pseudowords","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2021-11-01","proceeding":"EMNLP 2021 11","authors":["Taelin Karidi","Yichu Zhou","Nathan Schneider","Omri Abend","Vivek Srikumar"],"abstract":"We present a method for exploring regions around individual points in a contextualized vector space (particularly, BERT space), as a way to investigate how these regions correspond to word senses. By inducing a contextualized “pseudoword” vector as a stand-in for a static embedding in the input layer, and then performing masked prediction of a word in the sentence, we are able to investigate the geometry of the BERT-space in a controlled manner around individual instances. Using our method on a set of carefully constructed sentences targeting highly ambiguous English words, we find substantial regularity in the contextualized space, with regions that correspond to distinct word senses; but between these regions there are occasionally “sense voids”—regions that do not correspond to any intelligible sense.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.806","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.806.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":"putting-words-in-berts-mouth-navigating","repo_url":"https://github.com/tai314159/pwibm-putting-words-in-bert-s-mouth","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"sentence","task_name":"Sentence"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}