3 research outputs found
Automatic Selection of Context Configurations for Improved Class-Specific Word Representations
This paper is concerned with identifying contexts useful for training word representation models for different word classes such as adjectives (A), verbs (V), and nouns (N). We introduce a simple yet effective framework for an automatic selection of {\em class-specific context configurations}. We construct a context configuration space based on universal dependency relations between words, and efficiently search this space with an adapted beam search algorithm. In word similarity tasks for each word class, we show that our framework is both effective and efficient. Particularly, it improves the Spearman's rho correlation with human scores on SimLex-999 over the best previously proposed class-specific contexts by 6 (A), 6 (V) and 5 (N) rho points. With our selected context configurations, we train on only 14% (A), 26.2% (V), and 33.6% (N) of all dependency-based contexts, resulting in a reduced training time. Our results generalise: we show that the configurations our algorithm learns for one English training setup outperform previously proposed context types in another training setup for English. Moreover, basing the configuration space on universal dependencies, it is possible to transfer the learned configurations to German and Italian. We also demonstrate improved per-class results over other context types in these two languages
Adversarial Propagation and Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Word Vector Specialization
Semantic specialization is the process of fine-tuning pre-trained
distributional word vectors using external lexical knowledge (e.g., WordNet) to
accentuate a particular semantic relation in the specialized vector space.
While post-processing specialization methods are applicable to arbitrary
distributional vectors, they are limited to updating only the vectors of words
occurring in external lexicons (i.e., seen words), leaving the vectors of all
other words unchanged. We propose a novel approach to specializing the full
distributional vocabulary. Our adversarial post-specialization method
propagates the external lexical knowledge to the full distributional space. We
exploit words seen in the resources as training examples for learning a global
specialization function. This function is learned by combining a standard
L2-distance loss with an adversarial loss: the adversarial component produces
more realistic output vectors. We show the effectiveness and robustness of the
proposed method across three languages and on three tasks: word similarity,
dialog state tracking, and lexical simplification. We report consistent
improvements over distributional word vectors and vectors specialized by other
state-of-the-art specialization frameworks. Finally, we also propose a
cross-lingual transfer method for zero-shot specialization which successfully
specializes a full target distributional space without any lexical knowledge in
the target language and without any bilingual data.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201