# What you can cram into a single vector: Probing sentence embeddings for linguistic properties

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01070 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01070/

## Key facts

- Cited by 457 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2018.

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Although much effort has recently been devoted to training high-quality sentence embeddings, we still have a poor understanding of what they are capturing. "Downstream" tasks, often based on sentence classification, are commonly used to evaluate the quality of sentence representations. The complexity of the tasks makes it however difficult to infer what kind of information is present in the representations. We introduce here 10 probing tasks designed to capture simple linguistic features of sentences, and we use them to study embeddings generated by three different encoders trained in eight distinct ways, uncovering intriguing properties of both encoders and training methods.