question
active
question:can-the-distributed-representation-of-lexical-entailment-be-decomposed-into-representations-of-the-individual-word-identitiesCan the distributed representation of lexical entailment be decomposed into representations of the individual word identities?
Research question leading to the key NLI finding about word identity data structures.
Source paper
extracted_from(2023) · Atticus Geiger · Zhengxuan Wu · Christopher Potts · Thomas Icard +1
Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count
Findings (1)
finding
- In contrast to hierarchical equality, lexical entailment in BERT decomposes into representations of word identities, not a single abstract relation.
Related by similarity (8)
cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edgeEntities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.
- Key asymmetry between hierarchical equality and NLI experiments; BERT stores identities rather than the abstract relation.
- Concluding claim about theoretical significance of the hierarchical equality finding.
- Acknowledged limitation: simple uncontroversial statements cannot distinguish truth from related epistemic features
- Central claim from connectionist models: complex coordination emerges without centralized control or external teacher.
- The underlying truth representation may generalize across lexical choices and languageshypothesis0.744Suggested by non-English Yes/No outputs post-intervention, requiring further investigation
- Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models with Dictionary Learning (Bricken et al., 2023)concept0.742Foundational SAE mechanistic interpretability paper
- Idea that information is spread across many neurons; superposition is a subtype.