SensePOLAR: Word sense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings

AbstractAdding interpretability to word embeddings represents an area of active research in textrepresentation. Recent work has explored the potential of embedding words via so-called polardimensions (e.g. good vs. bad, correct vs. wrong). Examples of such recent approachesinclude SemAxis, POLAR, FrameAxis, and BiImp. Although these approaches provide interpretabledimensions for words, they have not been designed to deal with polysemy, i.e. they can not easily distinguish between different senses of words. To address this limitation, we present SensePOLAR, an extension of the original POLAR framework that enables wordsense aware interpretability for pre-trained contextual word embeddings. The resulting interpretable word embeddings achieve a level ofperformance that is comparable to original contextual word embeddings across a variety ofnatural language processing tasks including the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. Our workremoves a fundamental limitation of existing approaches by offering users sense aware interpretationsfor contextual word embeddings.