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Month: October 2014

Linguistic Regularities in Word Representations

Marek 3 Comments

In 2013, Mikolov et al. (2013) published a paper showing that complicated semantic analogy problems could be solved simply by adding and subtracting vectors learned with a neural network. Since then, there has been some more investigation into what is actually behind this method, and also some suggested improvements. This post is a summary/discussion of the paper “Linguistic Regularities in Sparse and Explicit Word Representations“, by Omer Levy and Yoav Goldberg, published at ACL 2014.

The Task

The task under consideration is analogy recovery. These are questions in the form:

a is to b as c is to d

In a usual setting, the system is given words a, b, c, and it needs to find d. For example:

‘apple’ is to ‘apples’ as ‘car’ is to ?

where the correct answer is ‘cars’. Or the well-known example:

‘man’ is to ‘woman’ as ‘king’ is to ?

where the desired answer is ‘queen’.

While methods such as relation extraction would also be completely reasonable approaches to this problem, the research is mainly focused on solving it by using vector similarity methods. This means we create vector representations for each of the words, and then use their positions in the high-dimensional feature space to determine what the missing word should be.

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Multilingual Semantic Models

Marek 0 Comments

In this post I’ll discuss a model for learning word embeddings, such that they end up in the same space in different languages. This means we can find the similarity between some English and German words, or even compare the meaning of two sentences in different languages. It is a summary and analysis of the paper by Karl Moritz Hermann and Phil Blunsom, titled “Multilingual Models for Compositional Distributional Semantics“, published at ACL 2014.

The Task

The goal of this work is to extend the distributional hypothesis to multilingual data and joint-space embeddings. This would give us the ability to compare words and sentences in different languages, and also make use of labelled training data from languages other than the target language. For example, below is an illustration of English words and their Estonian translations in the same semantic space.

vector_space_model_multilingual

 

This actually turns out to be a very difficult task, because the distributional hypothesis stops working across different languages. While “fish” is an important feature of “cat”, because they occur together often, “kass” never occurs with “fish”, because they are in different languages and therefore used in separate sets of documents.

In order to learn these representations in the same space, the authors construct a neural network that learns from parallel sentences (pairs of the same sentence in different languages). The model is then evaluated on the task of topic classification, training on one language and testing on the other.

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Political ideology detection

Marek 3 Comments

Neural networks have a range of interesting applications, and here I will discuss on one them: recursive neural networks and the detection of political ideology. This post is a summary and analysis of a recent publication by Mohit Iyyer, Peter Anns, Jordan Boyd-Graber and Philip Resnik: “Political Ideology Detection Using Recursive Neural Networks“.

The Task

Given a sentence, we want the model to detect the political ideology expressed in that sentence. In this research, the authors deal with US politics, so the possible options are liberal (democrats) or conservative (republicans). As a practical application we might consider a system that processes a large amount of news articles or public speeches to detect and measure explicit or hidden political bias of the authors.

democrat-republican

A traditional approach to this problem is a simple bag-of-words model, where each word is treated as a separate feature, but this ignores any syntactic structure and even word order. As shown below, political ideology can be compositionally complicated – while certain sections of the sentence are locally conservative, the way they are used in context makes the overall sentence liberal.political_sample_1

Figure 1: Sample sentence from Iyyer et al. (2014). Blue nodes are liberal, red nodes are conservative, grey nodes are neutral.

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