[minimaxir]

> The BERT-like and other transformer embeddings far outperform word vectors because they can take into account the context of the word.

In addition to being able to utilize attention mechanisms, modern embedding models use a form of tokenization such as BPE which a) includes punctuation which is incredibly important for extracting semantic meaning and b) includes case, without as much memory requirements as a cased model.

The original BERT used an uncased, SentencePiece tokenizer which is out of date nowadays.

[PaulHoule]

I was working at a startup that was trying to develop foundation models around at time and BPE was such a huge improvement over everything else we'd tried at that time. We had endless meetings where people proposed that we use various embeddings that would lose 100% of the information for out-of-dictionary words and I'd point out that out-of-dictionary words (particularly from the viewpoint of the pretrained model) frequently meant something critical and if we lost that information up front we couldn't get it back.

Little did I know that people were going to have a lot of tolerance for "short circuiting" of LLMs, that is getting the right answer by the wrong path, so I'd say now that my methodology of "predictive evaluation" that would put an upper bound on what a system could do was pessimistic. Still I don't like giving credit for "right answer by wrong means" since you can't count on it.