SemCSE-Multi: Multifaceted and Decodable Embeddings for Aspect-Specific and Interpretable Scientific Domain Mapping

Marc Brinner, Sina Zarrie{\ss}


Abstract
We propose SemCSE-Multi, a novel unsupervised framework for generating multifaceted embeddings of scientific abstracts, evaluated in the domains of invasion biology and medicine. These embeddings capture distinct, individually specifiable aspects in isolation, thus enabling fine-grained and controllable similarity assessments as well as adaptive, user-driven visualizations of scientific domains. Our approach relies on an unsupervised procedure that produces aspect-specific summarizing sentences and trains embedding models to map semantically related summaries to nearby positions in the embedding space. We then distill these aspect-specific embedding capabilities into a unified embedding model that directly predicts multiple aspect embeddings from a scientific abstract in a single, efficient forward pass. In addition, we introduce an embedding decoding pipeline that decodes embeddings back into natural language descriptions of their associated aspects. Notably, we show that this decoding remains effective even for unoccupied regions in low-dimensional visualizations, thus offering vastly improved interpretability in user-centric settings.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1884
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
40565–40586
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1884/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marc Brinner and Sina Zarrie{\ss}. 2026. SemCSE-Multi: Multifaceted and Decodable Embeddings for Aspect-Specific and Interpretable Scientific Domain Mapping. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 40565–40586, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SemCSE-Multi: Multifaceted and Decodable Embeddings for Aspect-Specific and Interpretable Scientific Domain Mapping (Brinner & Zarrie{\ss}, ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1884.pdf
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