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Poster

Visualizing and Measuring the Geometry of BERT

Emily Reif · Ann Yuan · Martin Wattenberg · Fernanda Viegas · Andy Coenen · Adam Pearce · Been Kim

East Exhibition Hall B + C #172

Keywords: [ Embedding Approaches ] [ Deep Learning ] [ Attention Models ]


Abstract:

Transformer architectures show significant promise for natural language processing. Given that a single pretrained model can be fine-tuned to perform well on many different tasks, these networks appear to extract generally useful linguistic features. A natural question is how such networks represent this information internally. This paper describes qualitative and quantitative investigations of one particularly effective model, BERT. At a high level, linguistic features seem to be represented in separate semantic and syntactic subspaces. We find evidence of a fine-grained geometric representation of word senses. We also present empirical descriptions of syntactic representations in both attention matrices and individual word embeddings, as well as a mathematical argument to explain the geometry of these representations.

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