@inproceedings{diera-scherp-2026-language,
title = "Do Language Models Encode Semantic Relations? Probing and Sparse Feature Analysis",
author = "Diera, Andor and
Scherp, Ansgar",
editor = "Piperidis, Stelios and
Bel, N{\'u}ria and
van den Heuvel, Henk and
Ide, Nancy and
Krek, Simon and
Toral, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.166/",
doi = "10.63317/52znrwwkdog7",
pages = "2115--2126",
abstract = "Understanding whether large language models (LLMs) capture structured meaning requires examining how they represent concept relationships. In this work, we study three models of increasing scale: Pythia-70M, GPT-2, and Llama 3.1 8B, focusing on four semantic relations: synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, and hyponymy. We combine linear probing with mechanistic interpretability techniques, including sparse autoencoders (SAE) and activation patching, to identify where these relations are encoded and how specific features contribute to their representation. Our results reveal a directional asymmetry in hierarchical relations: hypernymy is encoded redundantly and resists suppression, while hyponymy relies on compact features that are more easily disrupted by ablation. More broadly, relation signals are diffuse but exhibit stable profiles: they peak in the mid-layers and are stronger in post-residual/MLP pathways than in attention. Difficulty is consistent across models (antonymy easiest, synonymy hardest). Probe-level causality is capacity-dependent: on Llama 3.1, SAE-guided patching reliably shifts these signals, whereas on smaller models the shifts are weak or unstable. Our results clarify where and how reliably semantic relations are represented inside LLMs, and provide a reproducible framework for relating sparse features to probe-level causal evidence."
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<abstract>Understanding whether large language models (LLMs) capture structured meaning requires examining how they represent concept relationships. In this work, we study three models of increasing scale: Pythia-70M, GPT-2, and Llama 3.1 8B, focusing on four semantic relations: synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, and hyponymy. We combine linear probing with mechanistic interpretability techniques, including sparse autoencoders (SAE) and activation patching, to identify where these relations are encoded and how specific features contribute to their representation. Our results reveal a directional asymmetry in hierarchical relations: hypernymy is encoded redundantly and resists suppression, while hyponymy relies on compact features that are more easily disrupted by ablation. More broadly, relation signals are diffuse but exhibit stable profiles: they peak in the mid-layers and are stronger in post-residual/MLP pathways than in attention. Difficulty is consistent across models (antonymy easiest, synonymy hardest). Probe-level causality is capacity-dependent: on Llama 3.1, SAE-guided patching reliably shifts these signals, whereas on smaller models the shifts are weak or unstable. Our results clarify where and how reliably semantic relations are represented inside LLMs, and provide a reproducible framework for relating sparse features to probe-level causal evidence.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Do Language Models Encode Semantic Relations? Probing and Sparse Feature Analysis
%A Diera, Andor
%A Scherp, Ansgar
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F diera-scherp-2026-language
%X Understanding whether large language models (LLMs) capture structured meaning requires examining how they represent concept relationships. In this work, we study three models of increasing scale: Pythia-70M, GPT-2, and Llama 3.1 8B, focusing on four semantic relations: synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, and hyponymy. We combine linear probing with mechanistic interpretability techniques, including sparse autoencoders (SAE) and activation patching, to identify where these relations are encoded and how specific features contribute to their representation. Our results reveal a directional asymmetry in hierarchical relations: hypernymy is encoded redundantly and resists suppression, while hyponymy relies on compact features that are more easily disrupted by ablation. More broadly, relation signals are diffuse but exhibit stable profiles: they peak in the mid-layers and are stronger in post-residual/MLP pathways than in attention. Difficulty is consistent across models (antonymy easiest, synonymy hardest). Probe-level causality is capacity-dependent: on Llama 3.1, SAE-guided patching reliably shifts these signals, whereas on smaller models the shifts are weak or unstable. Our results clarify where and how reliably semantic relations are represented inside LLMs, and provide a reproducible framework for relating sparse features to probe-level causal evidence.
%R 10.63317/52znrwwkdog7
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.166/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/52znrwwkdog7
%P 2115-2126
Markdown (Informal)
[Do Language Models Encode Semantic Relations? Probing and Sparse Feature Analysis](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.166/) (Diera & Scherp, LREC 2026)
ACL