<commit_before>---
layout:     post
title:      Word Embeddings&#58; Explaining their properties
date:       2016-02-14 00:00:42 -0800
summary:    Theoretical understanding of word embeddings
author:     <NAME>
visible:    true
---

This is a followup to an [earlier post](http://www.offconvex.org/2015/12/12/word-embeddings-1/) about word embeddings, which capture the meaning of a word using a low-dimensional vector, and are ubiquitous in natural language processing. I will talk about [my joint work with Li, Liang, <NAME>ki](http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03520), which tries to mathematically explain their fascinating properties. 

We focus on a few questions. (a) What properties of natural languages cause these low-dimensional embeddings to exist?   (b) Why do low-dimensional embeddings work better at analogy solving than high dimensional embeddings?

In a future blog post I will address another question answered by [our subsequent work](http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03764): How should  a word embedding be interpreted when a word has multiple meanings? <commit_msg>Update 2016-02-14-word-embeddings-2.md<commit_after>---
layout:     post
title:      Word Embeddings&#58; Explaining their properties
date:       2016-02-14 00:00:42 -0800
summary:    Theoretical understanding of word embeddings
author:     <NAME>
visible:    false
---

This is a followup to an [earlier post](http://www.offconvex.org/2015/12/12/word-embeddings-1/) about word embeddings, which capture the meaning of a word using a low-dimensional vector, and are ubiquitous in natural language processing. I will talk about [my joint work with Li, Liang, <NAME>ki](http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03520), which tries to mathematically explain their fascinating properties. 

We focus on a few questions. (a) What properties of natural languages cause these low-dimensional embeddings to exist?   (b) Why do low-dimensional embeddings work better at analogy solving than high dimensional embeddings?

In a future blog post I will address another question answered by [our subsequent work](http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03764): How should  a word embedding be interpreted when a word has multiple meanings? 
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