A visual observation on the geometry of UMAP projections of the difference vectors of antonym and synonym word pair embeddings
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Abstract (arXiv)
Antonyms, or opposites, are sometimes defined as word pairs that have all of the same contextually relevant properties but one. Seeing how transformer models seem to encode concepts as directions, this begs the question if one can detect ``antonymity'' in the geometry of the embedding vectors of word pairs, especially based on their difference vectors. Such geometrical studies are then naturally contrasted by comparing antonymic pairs to their opposites; synonyms. This paper started as an exploratory project on the complexity of the systems needed to detect the geometry of the embedding vectors of antonymic word pairs. What we now report is a curious ``swirl'' that appears across embedding models in a somewhat specific projection configuration.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 12 of its 23 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.
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References · 12
- 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
- 2018UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reductioncited by 2,841
- 2016Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to Homemaker? Debiasing Word Embeddingscited by 1,304
- 2022Toy Models of Superpositioncited by 928
- 2024The Platonic Representation Hypothesiscited by 362
- 2016Counter-fitting Word Vectors to Linguistic Constraintscited by 138
- 2025Harnessing the Universal Geometry of Embeddingscited by 54
- 2017Distinguishing Antonyms and Synonyms in a Pattern-based Neural Networkcited by 19
- 2016Integrating Distributional Lexical Contrast into Word Embeddings for Antonym-Synonym Distinctioncited by 13
- 2019Antonym-Synonym Classification Based on New Sub-space Embeddingscited by 9
- 2022What company do words keep? Revisiting the distributional semantics of J.R. Firth & Zellig Harriscited by 8
- 2020Intuitive Contrasting Map for Antonym Embeddingscited by 2
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