Joshua Coates


2018

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Frustratingly Easy Meta-Embedding – Computing Meta-Embeddings by Averaging Source Word Embeddings
Joshua Coates | Danushka Bollegala
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

Creating accurate meta-embeddings from pre-trained source embeddings has received attention lately. Methods based on global and locally-linear transformation and concatenation have shown to produce accurate meta-embeddings. In this paper, we show that the arithmetic mean of two distinct word embedding sets yields a performant meta-embedding that is comparable or better than more complex meta-embedding learning methods. The result seems counter-intuitive given that vector spaces in different source embeddings are not comparable and cannot be simply averaged. We give insight into why averaging can still produce accurate meta-embedding despite the incomparability of the source vector spaces.