Rui Ferreira


2019

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Misspelling Oblivious Word Embeddings
Aleksandra Piktus | Necati Bora Edizel | Piotr Bojanowski | Edouard Grave | Rui Ferreira | Fabrizio Silvestri
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

In this paper we present a method to learn word embeddings that are resilient to misspellings. Existing word embeddings have limited applicability to malformed texts, which contain a non-negligible amount of out-of-vocabulary words. We propose a method combining FastText with subwords and a supervised task of learning misspelling patterns. In our method, misspellings of each word are embedded close to their correct variants. We train these embeddings on a new dataset we are releasing publicly. Finally, we experimentally show the advantages of this approach on both intrinsic and extrinsic NLP tasks using public test sets.