Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models
cs.AI, cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-09-04
Updated: 2026-09-04
Comments: 29 pages, 2 figures (one with 2 subfigures), 1 table. Toolkit, source code, and corpora archived separately on Zenodo (see Section 9)
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: A transformer language model assigns a single, context-independent vector to a word type at its embedding layer, yet is widely believed to individuate that word's occurrences by context in its later
Terminology
Abstract
A transformer language model assigns a single, context-independent vector to a word type at its embedding layer, yet is widely believed to individuate that word's occurrences by context in its later layers. Testing this belief cleanly requires a construct that holds the word form fixed while its context and intended sense vary in a controlled, labeled way. This manual documents an open toolkit built around such a construct, which we call a bridge form: a single written word that recurs, unchanged, across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each. We describe, and justify, every stage of the pipeline: the declarative specification of bridge forms and their source domains, corpus acquisition from Wikipedia, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, a domain-pairwise silhouette measurement of separation in the model's representation space, and a paired visualization protocol. Each design choice is presented together with the methodological failure mode it is meant to avoid (sense contamination from overly broad category labels, the multi-group bias of the silhouette coefficient, subword-tokenization misalignment, and axis-comparability artifacts in dimensionality-reduced plots, among others). This manuscript is a methodological and implementation reference: it does not report or interpret empirical outcomes of running the toolkit on any particular model or bridge-form set. The toolkit, its full source, and the corpora used to exercise it are archived separately (Section 9) under a persistent identifier, and are intended to be cited as an instrument by studies that use it to produce and interpret empirical results.
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