Challenge: Pre-trained transformer language models have shown remarkable performance on a variety of NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose to fine-tune transformer language models on a paraphrase and sentiment task and analyze their results to determine whether they benefit compositionality.
Outcome: The proposed model performance on a paraphrase and sentiment task is compared with pre-trained models on lexical-level representations.

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On the Interplay Between Fine-tuning and Sentence-level Probing for Linguistic Knowledge in Pre-trained Transformers (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: linguistic knowledge encoded in pre-trained contextual embeddings is poorly understood . fine-tuning can be used to investigate the representations of pre-train models .
Approach: They propose to investigate fine-tuning of contextualized embedding models through sentence-level probing.
Outcome: The proposed method improves probing accuracy for three pre-trained models.
Assessing Phrasal Representation and Composition in Transformers (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for deep transformers are able to combine word meanings into phrase meanings, but they lack a clear understanding of how they handle complex linguistic inputs.
Approach: They propose to analyze phrasal representations in pre-trained transformers to determine whether they reflect sophisticated composition of phrase meaning.
Outcome: The proposed models are able to combine meaning units into larger units, a phenomenon known as composition, and reflects human understanding of meaning.
LexFit: Lexical Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Transformer-based language models implicitly store a wealth of lexical semantic knowledge, but it is non-trivial to extract that knowledge effectively from their parameters.
Approach: They propose to expose and enrich lexical knowledge from transformer-based language models to serve as effective decontextualized word encoders even when fed input words "in isolation"
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms standard static WEs and vanilla LMs in lexical tasks over four established tasks in 8 languages.
Investigating the Representation of Backchannels and Fillers in Fine-tuned Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Backchannels and fillers are important linguistic expressions in dialogue, but often ignored in modern transformer-based language models.
Approach: They use clustering analysis to learn backchannels and fillers in dialogues in English and Japanese and use natural language generation metrics to confirm this.
Outcome: The proposed models can learn representations of backchannels and fillers using three fine-tuning strategies.
Learning to Perform Complex Tasks through Compositional Fine-Tuning of Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent work on how to encode compositional task structure has been limited by semantic parsing and multihop reasoning for the purpose of Q&A.
Approach: They propose an approach to decomposing a target task into component tasks and fine-tuning smaller LMs on a curriculum of such component tasks.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms end-to-end learning even with equal data, and gets better as more component tasks are modeled.
How do Transformer Embeddings Represent Compositions? A Functional Analysis (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Despite the popularity of transformer-based models, little is known about how they represent compound words and whether they are compositional.
Approach: They evaluate compositionality in mistral, OpenAI Large, and Google embedding models and compare them with BERT.
Outcome: The proposed models perform best in addition, multiplication, dilation, regression, and the classic vector addition model performs almost as well as any other model.
The Impact of Depth on Compositional Generalization in Transformer Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: In this paper, we test the hypothesis that deeper transformers generalize more compositionally.
Approach: They propose to add layers to transformers to generalize more compositionally . they propose to fine-tune the models so that the total number of parameters is constant .
Outcome: The proposed model generalizes more compositionally than shallower models, but returns diminish . the proposed model can be made shallower without sacrificing performance .
How Does Fine-tuning Affect the Geometry of Embedding Space: A Case Study on Isotropy (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained language models are ineffective, despite their potential, pre-training models suffer from important weaknesses.
Approach: They analyze the extent to which the isotropy of the embedding space changes after fine-tuning.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the isotropy of embedding space after fine-tuning . the model can encode linguistic properties, but lacks the social bias needed to improve it .
What Context Features Can Transformer Language Models Use? (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that transformer-based language models benefit from conditioning on contexts of hundreds to thousands of previous tokens.
Approach: They propose to use lexical and structural information to ablate usable information in transformer language models.
Outcome: The proposed model improves when conditioning on contexts of thousands of previous tokens.
Quantifying Compositionality of Classic and State-of-the-Art Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Static word embeddings make strong claims about compositionality, but the SOTA generative models go too far in the other direction.
Approach: a new study evaluates the compositionality of word embeddings by canonical correlation analysis . strong compositional signals are observed in later training stages across data modalities .
Outcome: a new evaluation of compositional models shows that they exploit access meanings when justified . strong compositional signals are observed in later training stages and in deeper layers of the transformer-based model before a decline at the top layer.

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