What’s in Your Embedding, And How It Predicts Task Performance

Anna Rogers, Shashwath Hosur Ananthakrishna, Anna Rumshisky


Abstract
Attempts to find a single technique for general-purpose intrinsic evaluation of word embeddings have so far not been successful. We present a new approach based on scaled-up qualitative analysis of word vector neighborhoods that quantifies interpretable characteristics of a given model (e.g. its preference for synonyms or shared morphological forms as nearest neighbors). We analyze 21 such factors and show how they correlate with performance on 14 extrinsic and intrinsic task datasets (and also explain the lack of correlation between some of them). Our approach enables multi-faceted evaluation, parameter search, and generally – a more principled, hypothesis-driven approach to development of distributional semantic representations.
Anthology ID:
C18-1228
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2690–2703
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1228
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Rogers, Shashwath Hosur Ananthakrishna, and Anna Rumshisky. 2018. What’s in Your Embedding, And How It Predicts Task Performance. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2690–2703, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
What’s in Your Embedding, And How It Predicts Task Performance (Rogers et al., COLING 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/C18-1228.pdf
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