Matthew Freestone

CL
h-index12
3papers
53citations
Novelty22%
AI Score20

3 Papers

CLFeb 26, 2025
Revisiting Word Embeddings in the LLM Era

Yash Mahajan, Matthew Freestone, Sathyanarayanan Aakur et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable advancement in various NLP tasks. As such, a popular trend has emerged lately where NLP researchers extract word/sentence/document embeddings from these large decoder-only models and use them for various inference tasks with promising results. However, it is still unclear whether the performance improvement of LLM-induced embeddings is merely because of scale or whether underlying embeddings they produce significantly differ from classical encoding models like Word2Vec, GloVe, Sentence-BERT (SBERT) or Universal Sentence Encoder (USE). This is the central question we investigate in the paper by systematically comparing classical decontextualized and contextualized word embeddings with the same for LLM-induced embeddings. Our results show that LLMs cluster semantically related words more tightly and perform better on analogy tasks in decontextualized settings. However, in contextualized settings, classical models like SimCSE often outperform LLMs in sentence-level similarity assessment tasks, highlighting their continued relevance for fine-grained semantics.

CLFeb 16, 2024
Revisiting Word Embeddings in the LLM Era

Yash Mahajan, Matthew Freestone, Naman Bansal et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable advancement in various NLP tasks. As such, a popular trend has emerged lately where NLP researchers extract word/sentence/document embeddings from these large decoder-only models and use them for various inference tasks with promising results. However, it is still unclear whether the performance improvement of LLM-induced embeddings is merely because of scale or whether underlying embeddings they produce significantly differ from classical encoding models like Word2Vec, GloVe, Sentence-BERT (SBERT) or Universal Sentence Encoder (USE). This is the central question we investigate in the paper by systematically comparing classical decontextualized and contextualized word embeddings with the same for LLM-induced embeddings. Our results show that LLMs cluster semantically related words more tightly and perform better on analogy tasks in decontextualized settings. However, in contextualized settings, classical models like SimCSE often outperform LLMs in sentence-level similarity assessment tasks, highlighting their continued relevance for fine-grained semantics.

CLFeb 23, 2024
LLMs as Meta-Reviewers' Assistants: A Case Study

Eftekhar Hossain, Sanjeev Kumar Sinha, Naman Bansal et al.

One of the most important yet onerous tasks in the academic peer-reviewing process is composing meta-reviews, which involves assimilating diverse opinions from multiple expert peers, formulating one's self-judgment as a senior expert, and then summarizing all these perspectives into a concise holistic overview to make an overall recommendation. This process is time-consuming and can be compromised by human factors like fatigue, inconsistency, missing tiny details, etc. Given the latest major developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), it is very compelling to rigorously study whether LLMs can help metareviewers perform this important task better. In this paper, we perform a case study with three popular LLMs, i.e., GPT-3.5, LLaMA2, and PaLM2, to assist meta-reviewers in better comprehending multiple experts perspectives by generating a controlled multi-perspective summary (MPS) of their opinions. To achieve this, we prompt three LLMs with different types/levels of prompts based on the recently proposed TELeR taxonomy. Finally, we perform a detailed qualitative study of the MPSs generated by the LLMs and report our findings.