iBERT: Interpretable Embeddings via Sense Decomposition

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Anand, Vishal, Alshomary, Milad, McKeown, Kathleen
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Anand, Vishal
Alshomary, Milad
McKeown, Kathleen
author_facet Anand, Vishal
Alshomary, Milad
McKeown, Kathleen
contents We present iBERT (interpretable-BERT), an encoder to produce inherently interpretable and controllable embeddings - designed to modularize and expose the discriminative cues present in language, such as semantic or stylistic structure. Each input token is represented as a sparse, non-negative mixture over k context-independent sense vectors, which can be pooled into sentence embeddings or used directly at the token level. This enables modular control over representation, before any decoding or downstream use. To demonstrate our model's interpretability, we evaluate it on a suite of style-focused tasks. On the STEL benchmark, it improves style representation effectiveness by ~8 points over SBERT-style baselines, while maintaining competitive performance on authorship verification. Because each embedding is a structured composition of interpretable senses, we highlight how specific style attributes get assigned to specific sense vectors. While our experiments center on style, iBERT is not limited to stylistic modeling. Its structural modularity is designed to interpretably decompose whichever discriminative signals are present in the data - enabling generalization even when supervision blends semantic or stylistic factors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_09882
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle iBERT: Interpretable Embeddings via Sense Decomposition
Anand, Vishal
Alshomary, Milad
McKeown, Kathleen
Computation and Language
We present iBERT (interpretable-BERT), an encoder to produce inherently interpretable and controllable embeddings - designed to modularize and expose the discriminative cues present in language, such as semantic or stylistic structure. Each input token is represented as a sparse, non-negative mixture over k context-independent sense vectors, which can be pooled into sentence embeddings or used directly at the token level. This enables modular control over representation, before any decoding or downstream use. To demonstrate our model's interpretability, we evaluate it on a suite of style-focused tasks. On the STEL benchmark, it improves style representation effectiveness by ~8 points over SBERT-style baselines, while maintaining competitive performance on authorship verification. Because each embedding is a structured composition of interpretable senses, we highlight how specific style attributes get assigned to specific sense vectors. While our experiments center on style, iBERT is not limited to stylistic modeling. Its structural modularity is designed to interpretably decompose whichever discriminative signals are present in the data - enabling generalization even when supervision blends semantic or stylistic factors.
title iBERT: Interpretable Embeddings via Sense Decomposition
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09882