Trying and failing to interpret sentence embeddings

I was born with congenital anosmia i.e. I cannot and have never been able to smell. Farts, flowers, cookies, and perfume; I have no personal experience of any of these smells. Yet, I can tell you that farts take over a room and cookies smell like home. This is all picked up through context. It’s picked up from watching my friends retching at the stench of the small animal that died in the vents of my middle school. For me, a smell is defined by its relation to other smells and the emotive descriptions of others. This is not altogether different from a sentence embedding.

I want to eventually build a system that can help me interpret smells. Now, I know I could ask an LLM (or a friend) to describe the smell of something but I do wonder if vector addition could provide some unexpected insights. What smells are quite similar but distant in context? I’d also like to try using reduced vectors to generate music or some other synesthetic output.

In this post, I’m going to explore vector addition and vector rotations as a means of modifying and interpreting these embeddings. My explorations are (mostly) a failure although hopefully, my process might save someone else some time.

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