A WordNet View on Crosslingual Transformers

Wondimagegnhue Tufa, Lisa Beinborn, Piek Vossen


Abstract
WordNet is a database that represents relations between words and concepts as an abstraction of the contexts in which words are used. Contextualized language models represent words in contexts but leave the underlying concepts implicit. In this paper, we investigate how different layers of a pre-trained language model shape the abstract lexical relationship toward the actual contextual concept. Can we define the amount of contextualized concept forming needed given the abstracted representation of a word? Specifically, we consider samples of words with different polysemy profiles shared across three languages, assuming that words with a different polysemy profile require a different degree of concept shaping by context. We conduct probing experiments to investigate the impact of prior polysemy profiles on the representation in different layers. We analyze how contextualized models can approximate meaning through context and examine crosslingual interference effects.
Anthology ID:
2023.gwc-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Global Wordnet Conference
Month:
January
Year:
2023
Address:
University of the Basque Country, Donostia - San Sebastian, Basque Country
Editors:
German Rigau, Francis Bond, Alexandre Rademaker
Venue:
GWC
SIG:
Publisher:
Global Wordnet Association
Note:
Pages:
14–24
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.gwc-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wondimagegnhue Tufa, Lisa Beinborn, and Piek Vossen. 2023. A WordNet View on Crosslingual Transformers. In Proceedings of the 12th Global Wordnet Conference, pages 14–24, University of the Basque Country, Donostia - San Sebastian, Basque Country. Global Wordnet Association.
Cite (Informal):
A WordNet View on Crosslingual Transformers (Tufa et al., GWC 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.gwc-1.2.pdf