# Towards Universal Semantics With Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11764 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11764/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [MEDEC: A Benchmark for Medical Error Detection and Correction in Clinical Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19260/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Contextualised Semantic Shift Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01666/) (2023)
- [Low-Resource Machine Translation through Retrieval-Augmented LLM Prompting: A Study on the Mambai Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04809/) (2024)
- [Is Small Language Model the Silver Bullet to Low-Resource Languages Machine Translation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24102/) (2025)
- [LUSIFER: Language Universal Space Integration for Enhanced Multilingual Embeddings with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00874/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a linguistic theory based on a universal set of semantic primes: simple, primitive word-meanings that have been shown to exist in most, if not all, languages of the world. According to this framework, any word, regardless of complexity, can be paraphrased using these primes, revealing a clear and universally translatable meaning. These paraphrases, known as explications, can offer valuable applications for many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, but producing them has traditionally been a slow, manual process. In this work, we present the first study of using large language models (LLMs) to generate NSM explications. We introduce automatic evaluation methods, a tailored dataset for training and evaluation, and fine-tuned models for this task. Our 1B and 8B models outperform GPT-4o in producing accurate, cross-translatable explications, marking a significant step toward universal semantic representation with LLMs and opening up new possibilities for applications in semantic analysis, translation, and beyond. Our code is available at https://github.com/OSU-STARLAB/DeepNSM.