Directional Contextual Representations for Dependency Relations: Why Cross-Direction Pairing Fails

Abstract: Splitting a bidirectional LSTM's contextual representation into a forward-only $F_i$ (strictly a function of tokens $1..i$) and a backward-only $B_i$ (strictly a function of tokens $i..n$) beats either alone and beats a fused self-attention representation for dependency relation-type classification. But a specific, natural extension of this idea -- pairing a token's forward state against a \emph{candidate}'s backward state (``cross-direction'' pairing, $F_i$ vs.\ $B_j$) -- consistently \emph{underperforms} same-direction pairing, and the penalty \emph{grows}, not shrinks, with token distance, both paired-bootstrap significant. We diagnose why using a frozen-trunk methodology: architectural information leakage between directions is impossible by construction (a single-layer BiLSTM, verified by code inspection); 93\% of the same-vs-cross gap survives freezing the trunk and training only fresh heads, ruling out training-co-adaptation as the primary cause; linear regression shows partial representational redundancy between $F_i$ and $B_i$ ($R<sup>2{=}0.324$ vs.\ $0.028$ for a shuffled control) and a linear probe shows partial anticipatory encoding of upcoming tokens in $F_i$ (36.5\% vs.\ 17.2\% majority baseline) -- real effects, but neither alone, nor combined, cleanly explains the full gap. Extended frozen-trunk diagnostics (a positional probe and a distance-decay probe) show directional information is genuinely stored but not exactly positioned, and propagates only a few tokens before decaying to baseline -- consistent with, and mechanistically underneath, the distance-growth finding.