# On Self-improving Token Embeddings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14808 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14808/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in LLM synthetic data generation, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs.
- Builds on 6 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2025.

## Placed in

- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [LLM synthetic data generation](https://mlsanity.com/synth/llm-synthetic-data-generation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [A La Carte Embedding: Cheap but Effective Induction of Semantic Feature Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05388/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article introduces a novel and fast method for refining pre-trained static word or, more generally, token embeddings. By incorporating the embeddings of neighboring tokens in text corpora, it continuously updates the representation of each token, including those without pre-assigned embeddings. This approach effectively addresses the out-of-vocabulary problem, too. Operating independently of large language models and shallow neural networks, it enables versatile applications such as corpus exploration, conceptual search, and word sense disambiguation. The method is designed to enhance token representations within topically homogeneous corpora, where the vocabulary is restricted to a specific domain, resulting in more meaningful embeddings compared to general-purpose pre-trained vectors. As an example, the methodology is applied to explore storm events and their impacts on infrastructure and communities using narratives from a subset of the NOAA Storm Events database. The article also demonstrates how the approach improves the representation of storm-related terms over time, providing valuable insights into the evolving nature of disaster narratives.