# Lost in Context? On the Sense-wise Variance of Contextualized Word Embeddings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09669 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09669/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 85 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Language Models as Knowledge Bases?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01066/) (2019)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [SuperGLUE: A Stickier Benchmark for General-Purpose Language Understanding Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00537/) (2019)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Neural Network Acceptability Judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12471/) (2018)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [What you can cram into a single vector: Probing sentence embeddings for linguistic properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01070/) (2018)
- [What do you learn from context? Probing for sentence structure in contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06316/) (2019)
- [Linguistic Knowledge and Transferability of Contextual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08855/) (2019)
- [WiC: the Word-in-Context Dataset for Evaluating Context-Sensitive Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09121/) (2018)
- [Measuring and Improving Consistency in Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01017/) (2021)
- [AllenNLP: A Deep Semantic Natural Language Processing Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07640/) (2018)
- [Visualizing and Measuring the Geometry of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02715/) (2019)
- [Assessing BERT's Syntactic Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05287/) (2019)
- [oLMpics -- On what Language Model Pre-training Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13283/) (2019)
- [Perturbed Masking: Parameter-free Probing for Analyzing and Interpreting BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14786/) (2020)
- [BERTs of a feather do not generalize together: Large variability in generalization across models with similar test set performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02969/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contextualized word embeddings in language models have given much advance to NLP. Intuitively, sentential information is integrated into the representation of words, which can help model polysemy. However, context sensitivity also leads to the variance of representations, which may break the semantic consistency for synonyms. We quantify how much the contextualized embeddings of each word sense vary across contexts in typical pre-trained models. Results show that contextualized embeddings can be highly consistent across contexts. In addition, part-of-speech, number of word senses, and sentence length have an influence on the variance of sense representations. Interestingly, we find that word representations are position-biased, where the first words in different contexts tend to be more similar. We analyze such a phenomenon and also propose a simple way to alleviate such bias in distance-based word sense disambiguation settings.