One-to-X Analogical Reasoning on Word Embeddings: a Case for Diachronic Armed Conflict Prediction from News Texts

Andrey Kutuzov, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid


Abstract
We extend the well-known word analogy task to a one-to-X formulation, including one-to-none cases, when no correct answer exists. The task is cast as a relation discovery problem and applied to historical armed conflicts datasets, attempting to predict new relations of type ‘location:armed-group’ based on data about past events. As the source of semantic information, we use diachronic word embedding models trained on English news texts. A simple technique to improve diachronic performance in such task is demonstrated, using a threshold based on a function of cosine distance to decrease the number of false positives; this approach is shown to be beneficial on two different corpora. Finally, we publish a ready-to-use test set for one-to-X analogy evaluation on historical armed conflicts data.
Anthology ID:
W19-4724
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Nina Tahmasebi, Lars Borin, Adam Jatowt, Yang Xu
Venue:
LChange
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
196–201
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-4724
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-4724
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrey Kutuzov, Erik Velldal, and Lilja Øvrelid. 2019. One-to-X Analogical Reasoning on Word Embeddings: a Case for Diachronic Armed Conflict Prediction from News Texts. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change, pages 196–201, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
One-to-X Analogical Reasoning on Word Embeddings: a Case for Diachronic Armed Conflict Prediction from News Texts (Kutuzov et al., LChange 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/W19-4724.pdf
Code
 ltgoslo/diachronic_armed_conflicts