# Where exactly does contextualization in a PLM happen?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06514 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06514/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12832/) (2020)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [How Contextual are Contextualized Word Representations? Comparing the Geometry of BERT, ELMo, and GPT-2 Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00512/) (2019)
- [Does BERT Make Any Sense? Interpretable Word Sense Disambiguation with Contextualized Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10430/) (2019)
- [Blackbox meets blackbox: Representational Similarity and Stability Analysis of Neural Language Models and Brains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01539/) (2019)
- [From Balustrades to Pierre Vinken: Looking for Syntax in Transformer Self-Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01958/) (2019)
- [Quantifying the Contextualization of Word Representations with Semantic Class Probing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12198/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Distillation of Syntactic Information from Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05265/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Probing Context Localization of Polysemous Words in Pre-trained Language Model Sub-Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14097/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown to be consistently successful in a plethora of NLP tasks due to their ability to learn contextualized representations of words (Ethayarajh, 2019). BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), ELMo (Peters et al., 2018) and other PLMs encode word meaning via textual context, as opposed to static word embeddings, which encode all meanings of a word in a single vector representation. In this work, we present a study that aims to localize where exactly in a PLM word contextualization happens. In order to find the location of this word meaning transformation, we investigate representations of polysemous words in the basic BERT uncased 12 layer architecture (Devlin et al., 2018), a masked language model trained on an additional sentence adjacency objective, using qualitative and quantitative measures.