Everyone Was Right: Lexical Representations in Language Models Are Both Abstract and Holistic
Lexical representations can encode both abstract information and information specific to particular contexts. We investigate how these forms of information are organized in language models by decomposing contextual word representations into item, class, and word-class interaction components. Across six pretrained transformers and two linguistic categories, we find that the interaction is consistently present, grows across layers, and contains information associated with both item and class. Unlike the nearly orthogonal item and class effects, the interaction overlaps with both and encodes class information beyond the shared class effect. An interaction also emerges in artificial-language ...
| Authors | Zachary Nicholas Houghton, Yu Zhou, Dan Pluth et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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