This repository is official implementation of the paper: ViConBERT: Context-Gloss Aligned Vietnamese Word Embedding for Polysemous and Sense-Aware Representations

Main architecture

Abstract: Recent progress in contextualized word embeddings has significantly advanced tasks involving word semantics, such as Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and contextual semantic similarity. However, these developments have largely focused on high-resource languages like English, while low-resource languages such as Vietnamese remain underexplored. This paper introduces a novel training framework for Vietnamese contextualized word embeddings, which integrates contrastive learning (SimCLR) and distillation with the gloss embedding space to better model word meaning. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset specifically designed to evaluate semantic understanding tasks in Vietnamese, which we constructed as part of this work. Experimental results demonstrate that ViConBERT outperforms strong baselines on the WSD task (F1 = 0.87) and achieves competitive results on ViCon (AP = 0.88) and ViSim-400 (Spearman’s $\rho$ = 0.60), effectively modeling both binary and graded semantic relations in Vietnamese.

Installation

Install transformers with pip: pip install transformers, or install transformers from source.
Note that we merged a slow tokenizer for PhoBERT into the main transformers branch. The process of merging a fast tokenizer for PhoBERT is in the discussion, as mentioned in this pull request. If users would like to utilize the fast tokenizer, the users might install transformers as follows:

git clone --single-branch --branch fast_tokenizers_BARTpho_PhoBERT_BERTweet https://github.com/datquocnguyen/transformers.git
cd transformers
pip3 install -e .

Install others dependencies requirements :

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

ViConBERT models

Model	#params	Arch.	Max length	Backbone	Training data
`tkhangg0910/viconbert-base`	135M	base	256	PhoBERT-base	ViConWSD
`tkhangg0910/viconbert-large`	370M	large	256	PhoBERT-large	ViConWSD

Example usage

SpanExtractor and text_normalize are implemented in code

python

import logging
from typing import Optional, Tuple
import re
from transformers import AutoModel, PhobertTokenizerFast,AutoTokenizer
import torch.nn.functional as F

from utils.span_extractor import SpanExtractor
from utils.process_data import text_normalize
import torch

model = AutoModel.from_pretrained(
    "tkhangg0910/viconbert-base",
    trust_remote_code=True,
    ignore_mismatched_sizes=True
)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("tkhangg0910/viconbert-base", use_fast=True)

span_ex =SpanExtractor(tokenizer)

def pipeline(query, target):
  query_norm=text_normalize(query)
  tokenized_query = tokenizer(query_norm,return_tensors="pt").to(device)
  span_idx = span_ex.get_span_indices(query_norm, target)
  span =torch.Tensor(span_idx).unsqueeze(0).to(device)
  model.eval()
  query_vec = model(tokenized_query, span)
  return query_vec

# Example: Homonyms: "Khoan" 
query_1 = "Tôi đang khoan."
target_1 = "Khoan"
query_vec_1 = pipeline(query_1, target_1)

query_2 = "khoan này bị mất mũi khoan."
target_2 = "khoan"
query_vec_2 = pipeline(query_2, target_2)

query_3 = "Khoan là việc rất tiện lợi."
target_3 = "Khoan"
query_vec_3 = pipeline(query_3, target_3)


def cosine_similarity(vec1, vec2):
    return F.cosine_similarity(vec1, vec2, dim=1).item()


sim_1 = cosine_similarity(query_vec_1, query_vec_3)
sim_2 = cosine_similarity(query_vec_2, query_vec_3)

print(f"Similarity between 1: {target_1}  and  3: {target_3}: {sim_1:.4f}")
print(f"Similarity between 2: {target_2} and 3:{target_3}: {sim_2:.4f}")

Embedding Space Visualization

"Khoan"

"chạy"

Zero-shot

Contextual separation of "Khoan", "chạy", and zero-shot ability for unseen words

Citation

If you find ViConBERT useful for your research and applications, please cite using this BibTeX:

Acknowledgement

PhoBERT: ViConBERT used PhoBERT as backbone model.