Interpreting Character Embeddings With Perceptual Representations: The Case of Shape, Sound, and Color

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Character-level information is included in many NLP models, but evaluating the information encoded in character representations is an open issue. We leverage perceptual representations in the form of shape, sound, and color embeddings and perform a representational similarity analysis to evaluate their correlation with textual representations in five languages. This cross-lingual analysis shows that textual character representations correlate strongly with sound representations for languages using an alphabetic script, while shape correlates with featural scripts.We further develop a set of probing classifiers to intrinsically evaluate what phonological information is encoded in character embeddings. Our results suggest that information on features such as voicing are embedded in both LSTM and transformer-based representations.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1
Place of PublicationDublin
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics
Publication date2022
Pages6819–6836
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022

ID: 306304258