4,112 research outputs found
Sparse Overcomplete Word Vector Representations
Current distributed representations of words show little resemblance to
theories of lexical semantics. The former are dense and uninterpretable, the
latter largely based on familiar, discrete classes (e.g., supersenses) and
relations (e.g., synonymy and hypernymy). We propose methods that transform
word vectors into sparse (and optionally binary) vectors. The resulting
representations are more similar to the interpretable features typically used
in NLP, though they are discovered automatically from raw corpora. Because the
vectors are highly sparse, they are computationally easy to work with. Most
importantly, we find that they outperform the original vectors on benchmark
tasks.Comment: Proceedings of ACL 201
Sleep-like slow oscillations improve visual classification through synaptic homeostasis and memory association in a thalamo-cortical model
The occurrence of sleep passed through the evolutionary sieve and is
widespread in animal species. Sleep is known to be beneficial to cognitive and
mnemonic tasks, while chronic sleep deprivation is detrimental. Despite the
importance of the phenomenon, a complete understanding of its functions and
underlying mechanisms is still lacking. In this paper, we show interesting
effects of deep-sleep-like slow oscillation activity on a simplified
thalamo-cortical model which is trained to encode, retrieve and classify images
of handwritten digits. During slow oscillations,
spike-timing-dependent-plasticity (STDP) produces a differential homeostatic
process. It is characterized by both a specific unsupervised enhancement of
connections among groups of neurons associated to instances of the same class
(digit) and a simultaneous down-regulation of stronger synapses created by the
training. This hierarchical organization of post-sleep internal representations
favours higher performances in retrieval and classification tasks. The
mechanism is based on the interaction between top-down cortico-thalamic
predictions and bottom-up thalamo-cortical projections during deep-sleep-like
slow oscillations. Indeed, when learned patterns are replayed during sleep,
cortico-thalamo-cortical connections favour the activation of other neurons
coding for similar thalamic inputs, promoting their association. Such mechanism
hints at possible applications to artificial learning systems.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, v5 is the final version published on Scientific
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