[johndough]

You can do math with word embeddings. A famous example (which I now see has also been mentioned in the article) is to compute the "woman vector" by subtracting "man" from "woman". You can then add the "woman vector" to e.g. the "king" vector to obtain a vector which is somewhat close to "queen".

To adapt this to your problem of ignoring writing style in queries, you could collect a few text samples with different writing styles but same content to compute a "style direction". Then when you do a query for some specific content, subtract the projection of your query embedding onto the style direction to eliminate the style:

    query_without_style = query - dot(query, style_direction) * style_direction

I suspect this also works with text embeddings, but you might have to train the embedding network in some special way to maximize the effectiveness of embedding arithmetic. Vector normalization might also be important, or maybe not. Probably depends on the training.

Another approach would be to compute a "content direction" instead of a "style direction" and eliminate every aspect of a query that is not content. Depending on what kind of texts you are working with, data collection for one or the other direction might be easier or have more/fewer biases.

And if you feel especially lazy when collecting data to compute embedding directions, you can generate texts with different styles using e.g. ChatGPT. This will probably not work as well as carefully handpicked texts, but you can make up for it with volume to some degree.

[joerick]

Interesting, but your hypothesis assumes that 'tone' is one-dimensional, that there is a single axis you can remove. I think tone is very multidimensional, I'd expect to be removing multiple 'directions' from the embedding.

[mattnewton]

No, I don’t think the author is saying one dimensional - the vectors are represented by magnitudes in almost all of the embedding dimensions.

They are still a “direction” in the way that [0.5, 0.5] in x,y space is a 45 degree angle, and in that direction it has a magnitude of around 0.7

So of course you could probably define some other vector space where many of the different labeled vectors are translated to magnitudes in the original embedding space, letting you do things like have a “tone” slider.

[TeMPOraL]

I think GP is saying that GGP assumes "tone" is one direction, in the sense there exists a vector V representing "tone direction", and you can scale "tone" independently by multiplying that vector with a scalar - hence, 1 dimension.

I'd say this assumption is both right and wrong. Wrong, because it's unlikely there's a direction in embedding space corresponding to a platonic ideal of "tone". Right, because I suspect that, for sufficiently large embedding space (on the order of what goes into current LLMs), any continuous concept we can articulate will have a corresponding direction in the embedding space, that's roughly as sharp as our ability to precisely define the concept.

[jerf]

I would say rather that the "standard example" is simplified, but it does capture an essential truth about the vectors. The surprise is not that the real world is complicated and nothing is simply expressible as a vector and that treating it as such doesn't 100% work in every way in every circumstance all of the time. That's obvious. Everyone who might work with embeddings gets it, and if they don't, they soon will. The surprise is that it does work as well as it does and does seem to be capturing more than a naive skepticism would expect.

[johndough]

You could of course compute multiple "tone" directions for every "tone" you can identify and subtract all of them. It might work better, but it will definitely be more work.