{"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/when-is-a-bishop-not-like-a-rook-when-it-s","title":"When is a bishop not like a rook? When it's like a rabbi! Multi-prototype BERT embeddings for estimating semantic relationships","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2020-11-01","proceeding":"CONLL 2020","authors":["Gabriella Chronis","Katrin Erk"],"abstract":"This paper investigates contextual language models, which produce token representations, as a resource for lexical semantics at the word or type level. We construct multi-prototype word embeddings from bert-base-uncased (Devlin et al., 2018). These embeddings retain contextual knowledge that is critical for some type-level tasks, while being less cumbersome and less subject to outlier effects than exemplar models. Similarity and relatedness estimation, both type-level tasks, benefit from this contextual knowledge, indicating the context-sensitivity of these processes. BERT{'}s token level knowledge also allows the testing of a type-level hypothesis about lexical abstractness, demonstrating the relationship between token-level phenomena and type-level concreteness ratings. Our findings provide important insight into the interpretability of BERT: layer 7 approximates semantic similarity, while the final layer (11) approximates relatedness.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/2020.conll-1.17","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/2020.conll-1.17.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":"when-is-a-bishop-not-like-a-rook-when-it-s","repo_url":"https://github.com/gchronis/mprobert","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"semantic-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Similarity"},{"task_slug":"semantic-textual-similarity","task_name":"Semantic Textual Similarity"},{"task_slug":"type","task_name":"Vocal Bursts Type Prediction"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"}],"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}