# Know Yourself and Know Your Neighbour: A Syntactically Informed Self-Supervised Compositional Sentence Representation Learning Framework using a Recursive Hypernetwork

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16547/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Sentences and Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.4053/) (2014)
- [MTEB: Massive Text Embedding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07316/) (2022)
- [What you can cram into a single vector: Probing sentence embeddings for linguistic properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01070/) (2018)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [Improved Semantic Representations From Tree-Structured Long Short-Term Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.00075/) (2015)
- [DeCLUTR: Deep Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Textual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03659/) (2020)
- [Visualizing and Measuring the Geometry of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02715/) (2019)
- [All-but-the-Top: Simple and Effective Postprocessing for Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01417/) (2017)
- [Constituency Parsing with a Self-Attentive Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01052/) (2018)
- [An efficient framework for learning sentence representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02893/) (2018)
- [Masked Language Modeling and the Distributional Hypothesis: Order Word Matters Pre-training for Little](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06644/) (2021)
- [Open Sesame: Getting Inside BERT's Linguistic Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01698/) (2019)
- [StructBERT: Incorporating Language Structures into Pre-training for Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04577/) (2019)
- [Auxiliary Tasks in Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06334/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Sentence Embeddings using Compositional n-Gram Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02507/) (2017)
- [Learning Distributed Representations of Sentences from Unlabelled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03483/) (2016)
- [Syntactic Data Augmentation Increases Robustness to Inference Heuristics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11999/) (2020)
- [Out of Order: How Important Is The Sequential Order of Words in a Sentence in Natural Language Understanding Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15180/) (2020)
- [UnNatural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00010/) (2020)
- [Towards Universal Paraphrastic Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08198/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sentence representation learning is still an open challenge in Natural Language Processing. In this work, we propose a new self-supervised framework for learning sentence representations, using a special type of neural network called a recursive hypernetwork. Our proposed model composes the representation of a sentence from representations of words by applying a recursive composition through the parse tree. We maintain a separate syntactic and semantic representation, and the semantic composition is guided by the information from the syntactic representation. To train this model, we introduce a novel set of six self-supervised tasks. By analysing the performance on 7 probing tasks, we validate that the generated sentence representation encodes richer linguistic information than both averaging baselines and state-of-the-art alternatives. Furthermore, we assess the impact of the six proposed self-supervised training tasks through ablation studies. We also demonstrate that the representations generated by our model are stable for sentences of varying length and that the semantic composition operators adapt to different syntactic categoriesfootnoteCode available: https://github.com/vasudev2020/codi/tree/main.
