Do General NLP Embeddings Capture Ontological Reasoning?

Title:Do General NLP Embeddings Capture Ontological Reasoning?

Abstract:General-purpose NLP embedding models perform well on linguistic tasks, but their ability to capture symbolic ontological structure remains unclear. We introduce AVA, a systematic framework for evaluating whether embeddings distinguish logic-sensitive relational semantics in ontologies and knowledge graphs. AVA comprises 171,007 contrastive triplets derived from 163 heterogeneous ontologies using hierarchy inversion, relation substitution, and disjointness injection. Each triplet contains an ontology statement, a semantically equivalent paraphrase, and a logic-sensitive hard negative with contradictory relational meaning. We evaluate more than 25 state-of-the-art embedding models and find substantial limitations: the best model achieves only 0.739 triplet accuracy, while hard negative accuracy falls to 0.135. Fine-tuning improves discrimination by a large margin but transfers poorly to downstream Semantic Web tasks, including taxonomy discovery and ontology alignment. Further analysis suggests that improvements stem partly from perturbation-specific pattern recognition rather than robust ontological understanding. These findings reveal a persistent gap between linguistic representation learning and ontology-level discrimination, challenging the assumption that strong NLP benchmark performance translates to Semantic Web competence.

7 pages, 3 figures. Accepted as a short paper at CIKM 2026

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.00177 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.00177v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.00177 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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