Probabilistic fasttext for multi-sense word embeddings

Ben Athiwaratkun, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Anima Anandkumar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We introduce Probabilistic FastText, a new model for word embeddings that can capture multiple word senses, sub-word structure, and uncertainty information. In particular, we represent each word with a Gaussian mixture density, where the mean of a mixture component is given by the sum of n-grams. This representation allows the model to share statistical strength across sub-word structures (e.g. Latin roots), producing accurate representations of rare, misspelt, or even unseen words. Moreover, each component of the mixture can capture a different word sense. Probabilistic FastText outperforms both FASTTEXT, which has no probabilistic model, and dictionary-level probabilistic embeddings, which do not incorporate subword structures, on several word-similarity benchmarks, including English RareWord and foreign language datasets. We also achieve state-of-art performance on benchmarks that measure ability to discern different meanings. Thus, the proposed model is the first to achieve multi-sense representations while having enriched semantics on rare words.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages1-11
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781948087322
DOIs
StatePublished - 2018
Event56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2018 - Melbourne, Australia
Duration: Jul 15 2018Jul 20 2018

Publication series

NameACL 2018 - 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers)
Volume1

Conference

Conference56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2018
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityMelbourne
Period7/15/187/20/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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