---
license: mit
language:
- en
base_model: microsoft/deberta-v3-base
pipeline_tag: text-classification
metrics:
- f1
- accuracy
tags:
- text-classification
- deberta-v3
- spatial-language
- spatial-reasoning
library_name: transformers
---

# DeBERTa-v3-base — Spatial Language Detection

A fine-tuned [`microsoft/deberta-v3-base`](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/deberta-v3-base)
for **word-level spatial-language detection**: given an utterance and a **target word**, it
decides whether that word is being used as spatial language (location, direction, or a spatial
relationship) **in that context** — `1` = spatial, `0` = not. The same word can be spatial in
one utterance ("go *up* the ramp") and not in another ("what's *up*?"), so the model always
judges a word together with its sentence.

For the full pipeline (dictionary gating, calibrated confidence, evaluation) and example
datasets, see the GitHub repo:
https://github.com/SamAgnoli/spatial-language-classifier

## Input format

This is a **sentence-pair** classifier: pass the **utterance** as the first segment and the
**target word** as the second — `tokenizer(utterance, target_word)`. Passing a whole sentence
on its own is *not* how the model was trained and gives unreliable results.

## Labels

| id | label | meaning |
|----|-------------|------------------------------------------|
| 0  | not_spatial | word is not spatial language |
| 1  | spatial     | word is spatial language |

## Usage

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model_id = "SamAgnoli/deberta-v3-base-spatial-language-detection"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(model_id)

utterance   = "The cat is sitting on top of the bookshelf."
target_word = "top"                       # the word you want judged
inputs = tokenizer(utterance, target_word, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True)
with torch.no_grad():
    logits = model(**inputs).logits
pred = logits.argmax(-1).item()
print(model.config.id2label[pred])        # -> "spatial"
```

Or with a pipeline (note the `text` / `text_pair` keys):

```python
from transformers import pipeline

clf = pipeline("text-classification",
               model="SamAgnoli/deberta-v3-base-spatial-language-detection")
print(clf({"text": "The cat is sitting on top of the bookshelf.", "text_pair": "top"}))
```

## Training data

Parent–child conversational reflections recorded at a museum tinkering exhibit
(Polinsky et al., 2023): **33,284 word tokens** across **152 conversations**. A
bag-of-words spatial dictionary (Cannon et al., 2007; Polinsky et al., 2023) selected
**3,516 candidate tokens** (10.6% of all words, 176 unique word types) which trained human
coders then judged in utterance context; **1,455** were coded spatial (41.4% of candidates,
4.4% of all words). Every remaining token is labelled non-spatial.

## Training

- **Base model:** `microsoft/deberta-v3-base`
- **Task:** binary sentence-pair classification (a word, in its utterance, spatial vs. not)
- **Split:** group-aware 70/15/15 by speaker session (no session spans splits) —
  23,100 / 5,714 / 4,470 tokens
- **Hyperparameters:** 2 epochs · lr 2e-5 · batch 16 · weight decay 0.01 · warmup ratio 0.1
  (289 steps) · max_length 128 · fp16 · seed 42 · best checkpoint by F1
- **Class imbalance:** no class weighting or resampling. The dictionary gate already raises the
  positive rate from 4.4% of all words to 41.4% of candidates, and checkpoint selection used
  minority-class F1 rather than accuracy.
- **Framework:** 🤗 Transformers 5.16.1

## Evaluation (held-out test set)

Reported for two views: **dictionary candidates only** (the meaningful view — words a spatial
dictionary flags as plausibly spatial) and **overall** (every word, dominated by trivially
non-spatial tokens).

### Candidates only — 526 words (315 not-spatial, 211 spatial)

| class | precision | recall | F1 | support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| not_spatial | 0.946 | 0.898 | 0.922 | 315 |
| spatial | 0.859 | 0.924 | 0.890 | 211 |

**Spatial candidate accuracy: 0.909** (478 of 526 words correct) · macro-F1 0.906 · Cohen's κ 0.812

Reading it per class: the model catches **92.4%** of truly-spatial words (recall) at **85.9%**
precision; for non-spatial words it's 89.8% recall at 94.6% precision. (sensitivity 0.924,
specificity 0.898, PPV 0.859, NPV 0.946.)

Confusion matrix (candidates): TN 283 · FP 32 · FN 16 · TP 195.

### Overall — every word, 4,470 tokens

accuracy **0.988** · spatial-F1 **0.882** · Cohen's κ **0.876**

> The two views share the *same* spatial predictions (211 spatial words, same 195 caught). Only
> the non-spatial pool differs, which is why "overall" accuracy looks higher — it's padded with
> ~3,900 easy non-candidate words the model trivially gets right. Judge the model by the
> **candidates-only** view.

## Calibration

Raw probabilities are over-confident, so a post-hoc **temperature scaling** factor
(**T = 1.461**, fit on the 592 validation candidates) rescales them into a calibrated
`P(spatial)` you can read literally. Temperature scaling is monotonic, so the hard 0/1 decision
is unchanged — verified by assertion on every test row.

On the candidate subset this lowers expected calibration error from **.059 to .050** (uniform
binning; .044 → .041 quantile) and the Brier score from **.074 to .069**. See section 7.5 of the
repo notebook.

## Intended use & limitations

- Built for **per-word** spatial judgments within an English utterance. In production it is
  paired with a spatial-dictionary gate that selects candidate words; words the dictionary
  misses (e.g., misspellings) are never sent to the model.
- Trained on parent–child tinkering-reflection speech — performance on other domains, genres,
  or languages is not guaranteed.
- The data is strongly imbalanced (4.4% spatial overall); judge quality by the
  **candidates-only** view, not the overall numbers.
- The held-out test set is a single group-aware split of 526 candidate words. Metrics carry
  meaningful sampling uncertainty at that size; treat differences of a point or two as noise.
- Review predictions before relying on them in downstream systems.

## Citation

Agnoli, S., Shi, Q., & Uttal, D. (2026). *Fine-tuning DeBERTa-v3 to automate spatial language
classification.* Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Measurement and Education (AIME-Con).