State-of-the-art pretrained contextualized models (PCM) eg. BERT use tasks such as WiC and WSD to evaluate their word-in-context representations. This inherently assumes that performance in these tasks reflect how well a model represents the coupled word and context semantics. We question this assumption by presenting the first quantitative analysis on the context-word interaction being tested in major contextual lexical semantic tasks. To achieve this, we run probing baselines on masked input, and propose measures to calculate and visualize the degree of context or word biases in existing datasets. The analysis was performed on both models and humans. Our findings demonstrate that models are usually not being tested for word-in-context semantics in the same way as humans are in these tasks, which helps us better understand the model-human gap. Specifically, to PCMs, most existing datasets fall into the extreme ends (the retrieval-based tasks exhibit strong target word bias while WiC-style tasks and WSD show strong context bias); In comparison, humans are less biased and achieve much better performance when both word and context are available than with masked input. We recommend our framework for understanding and controlling these biases for model interpretation and future task design.

Research into representation learning models of lexical semantics usually utilizes some form of intrinsic evaluation to ensure that the learned representations reflect human semantic judgments. Lexical semantic similarity estimation is a widely used evaluation method, but efforts have typically focused on pairwise judgments of words in isolation, or are limited to specific contexts and lexical stimuli. There are limitations with these approaches that either do not provide any context for judgments, and thereby ignore ambiguity, or provide very specific sentential contexts that cannot then be used to generate a larger lexical resource. Furthermore, similarity between more than two items is not considered. We provide a full description and analysis of our recently proposed methodology for large-scale data set construction that produces a semantic classification of a large sample of verbs in the first phase, as well as multi-way similarity judgments made within the resultant semantic classes in the second phase. The methodology uses a spatial multi-arrangement approach proposed in the field of cognitive neuroscience for capturing multi-way similarity judgments of visual stimuli. We have adapted this method to handle polysemous linguistic stimuli and much larger samples than previous work. We specifically target verbs, but the method can equally be applied to other parts of speech. We perform cluster analysis on the data from the first phase and demonstrate how this might be useful in the construction of a comprehensive verb resource. We also analyze the semantic information captured by the second phase and discuss the potential of the spatially induced similarity judgments to better reflect human notions of word similarity. We demonstrate how the resultant data set can be used for fine-grained analyses and evaluation of representation learning models on the intrinsic tasks of semantic clustering and semantic similarity. In particular, we find that stronger static word embedding methods still outperform lexical representations emerging from more recent pre-training methods, both on word-level similarity and clustering. Moreover, thanks to the data set’s vast coverage, we are able to compare the benefits of specializing vector representations for a particular type of external knowledge by evaluating FrameNet- and VerbNet-retrofitted models on specific semantic domains such as “Heat” or “Motion.”

Capturing word meaning in context and distinguishing between correspondences and variations across languages is key to building successful multilingual and cross-lingual text representation models. However, existing multilingual evaluation datasets that evaluate lexical semantics “in-context” have various limitations. In particular, 1) their language coverage is restricted to high-resource languages and skewed in favor of only a few language families and areas, 2) a design that makes the task solvable via superficial cues, which results in artificially inflated (and sometimes super-human) performances of pretrained encoders, and 3) no support for cross-lingual evaluation. In order to address these gaps, we present AM2iCo (Adversarial and Multilingual Meaning in Context), a wide-coverage cross-lingual and multilingual evaluation set; it aims to faithfully assess the ability of state-of-the-art (SotA) representation models to understand the identity of word meaning in cross-lingual contexts for 14 language pairs. We conduct a series of experiments in a wide range of setups and demonstrate the challenging nature of AM2iCo. The results reveal that current SotA pretrained encoders substantially lag behind human performance, and the largest gaps are observed for low-resource languages and languages dissimilar to English.

We present a novel methodology for fast bottom-up creation of large-scale semantic similarity resources to support development and evaluation of NLP systems. Our work targets verb similarity, but the methodology is equally applicable to other parts of speech. Our approach circumvents the bottleneck of slow and expensive manual development of lexical resources by leveraging semantic intuitions of native speakers and adapting a spatial multi-arrangement approach from cognitive neuroscience, used before only with visual stimuli, to lexical stimuli. Our approach critically obtains judgments of word similarity in the context of a set of related words, rather than of word pairs in isolation. We also handle lexical ambiguity as a natural consequence of a two-phase process where verbs are placed in broad semantic classes prior to the fine-grained spatial similarity judgments. Our proposed design produces a large-scale verb resource comprising 17 relatedness-based classes and a verb similarity dataset containing similarity scores for 29,721 unique verb pairs and 825 target verbs, which we release with this paper.

One of the most powerful features of contextualized models is their dynamic embeddings for words in context, leading to state-of-the-art representations for context-aware lexical semantics. In this paper, we present a post-processing technique that enhances these representations by learning a transformation through static anchors. Our method requires only another pre-trained model and no labeled data is needed. We show consistent improvement in a range of benchmark tasks that test contextual variations of meaning both across different usages of a word and across different words as they are used in context. We demonstrate that while the original contextual representations can be improved by another embedding space from both contextualized and static models, the static embeddings, which have lower computational requirements, provide the most gains.

We present the first evaluation of the applicability of a spatial arrangement method (SpAM) to a typologically diverse language sample, and its potential to produce semantic evaluation resources to support multilingual NLP, with a focus on verb semantics. We demonstrate SpAM’s utility in allowing for quick bottom-up creation of large-scale evaluation datasets that balance cross-lingual alignment with language specificity. Starting from a shared sample of 825 English verbs, translated into Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, Polish, and Italian, we apply a two-phase annotation process which produces (i) semantic verb classes and (ii) fine-grained similarity scores for nearly 130 thousand verb pairs. We use the two types of verb data to (a) examine cross-lingual similarities and variation, and (b) evaluate the capacity of static and contextualised representation models to accurately reflect verb semantics, contrasting the performance of large language specific pretraining models with their multilingual equivalent on semantic clustering and lexical similarity, across different domains of verb meaning. We release the data from both phases as a large-scale multilingual resource, comprising 85 verb classes and nearly 130k pairwise similarity scores, offering a wealth of possibilities for further evaluation and research on multilingual verb semantics.

In this paper, we present a thorough investigation on methods that align pre-trained contextualized embeddings into shared cross-lingual context-aware embedding space, providing strong reference benchmarks for future context-aware crosslingual models. We propose a novel and challenging task, Bilingual Token-level Sense Retrieval (BTSR). It specifically evaluates the accurate alignment of words with the same meaning in cross-lingual non-parallel contexts, currently not evaluated by existing tasks such as Bilingual Contextual Word Similarity and Sentence Retrieval. We show how the proposed BTSR task highlights the merits of different alignment methods. In particular, we find that using context average type-level alignment is effective in transferring monolingual contextualized embeddings cross-lingually especially in non-parallel contexts, and at the same time improves the monolingual space. Furthermore, aligning independently trained models yields better performance than aligning multilingual embeddings with shared vocabulary.

There is a growing awareness of the need to handle rare and unseen words in word representation modelling. In this paper, we focus on few-shot learning of emerging concepts that fully exploits only a few available contexts. We introduce a substitute-based context representation technique that can be applied on an existing word embedding space. Previous context-based approaches to modelling unseen words only consider bag-of-word first-order contexts, whereas our method aggregates contexts as second-order substitutes that are produced by a sequence-aware sentence completion model. We experimented with three tasks that aim to test the modelling of emerging concepts. We found that these tasks show different emphasis on first and second order contexts, and our substitute-based method achieves superior performance on naturally-occurring contexts from corpora.

Paraphrases extracted from parallel corpora by the pivot method (Bannard and Callison-Burch, 2005) constitute a valuable resource for multilingual NLP applications. In this study, we analyse the semantics of unigram pivot paraphrases and use a graph-based sense induction approach to unveil hidden sense distinctions in the paraphrase sets. The comparison of the acquired senses to gold data from the Lexical Substitution shared task (McCarthy and Navigli, 2007) demonstrates that sense distinctions exist in the paraphrase sets and highlights the need for a disambiguation step in applications using this resource.

In this paper we analyse data from the SemEval lexical substitution task in those cases where the annotators indicated that the target word was part of a phrase before substituting the target with a synonym. We classify the types of phrases that were provided in this way by the annotators in order to evaluate the utility of the method as a means of producing a gold-standard for multiword evaluation. Multiword evaluation is a difficult area because lexical resources are not complete and people’s judgments on multiwords vary. Whilst we do not believe lexical substitution is necessarily a panacea for multiword evaluation, we do believe it is a useful methodology because the annotator is focused on the task of substitution. Following the analysis, we make some recommendations which would make the data easier to classify.