In this work we analyze the performances of two of the most used word embeddings algorithms, skip-gram and continuous bag of words on Italian language. These algorithms have many hyper-parameter that have to be carefully tuned in order to obtain accurate word representation in vectorial space. We provide an accurate analysis and an evaluation, showing what are the best configuration of parameters for specific tasks.
However, these optimistic results are not confirmed by more recent studies. Indeed the performance of word embedding are not directly comparable in the accuracy test to those obtained in the English language. For example, combining the word embeddings in a dependency parser have not observed improvements over a baseline system not using such features. found a $ 47 Similarly, recent work that trained word embeddings on tweets have highlighted some criticalities. One of these aspects is how the morphology of a word is opaque to word embeddings. Indeed, the relatedness of the meaning of a lemma's different word forms, its different string representations, is not systematically encoded. This means that in morphologically rich languages with long-tailed frequency distributions, even some word embedding representations for word forms of common lemmata may become very poor @cite_2 .
@cite_2
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Unsupervised word embeddings provide rich linguistic and conceptual information about words. However, they may provide weak information about domain specific semantic relations for certain tasks such as semantic parsing of natural language queries, where such information about words can be valuable. To encode the prior knowledge about the semantic word relations, we present new method as follows: We extend the neural network based lexical word embedding objective function Mikolov, et.al. 2013 by incorporating the information about relationship between entities that we extract from knowledge bases. Our model can jointly learn lexical word representations from free text enriched by the relational word embeddings from relational data (e.g., Freebase) for each type of entity relations. We empirically show on the task of semantic tagging of natural language queries that our enriched embeddings can provide information about not only short-range syntactic dependencies but also long-range semantic dependencies between words. Using the enriched embeddings, we obtain an average of 2 improvement in F-score compared to the previous baselines. Distributed word embeddings have shown superior performances in numerous Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, their performances vary significantly across different tasks, implying that the word embeddings learnt by those methods capture complementary aspects of lexical semantics. Therefore, we believe that it is important to combine the existing word embeddings to produce more accurate and complete of words. For this purpose, we propose an unsupervised locally linear meta-embedding learning method that takes pre-trained word embeddings as the input, and produces more accurate meta embeddings. Unlike previously proposed meta-embedding learning methods that learn a global projection over all words in a vocabulary, our proposed method is sensitive to the differences in local neighbourhoods of the individual source word embeddings. Moreover, we show that vector concatenation, a previously proposed highly competitive baseline approach for integrating word embeddings, can be derived as a special case of the proposed method. Experimental results on semantic similarity, word analogy, relation classification, and short-text classification tasks show that our meta-embeddings to significantly outperform prior methods in several benchmark datasets, establishing a new state of the art for meta-embeddings. We propose the use of the word categories and embeddings induced from raw text as auxiliary features in dependency parsing. To induce word features, we make use of contextual, morphologic and orthographic properties of the words. To exploit the contextual information, we make use of substitute words, the most likely substitutes for target words, generated by using a statistical language model. We generate morphologic and orthographic properties of word types in an unsupervised manner. We use a co-occurrence model with these properties to embed words onto a 25dimensional unit sphere. The AI-KU system shows improvements for some of the languages it is trained on for the first Shared Task of Statistical Parsing of Morphologically Rich Languages. The success of neural network methods for computing word embeddings has motivated methods for generating semantic embeddings of longer pieces of text, such as sentences and paragraphs. Surprisingly, (ICLR'16) showed that such complicated methods are outperformed, especially in out-of-domain (transfer learning) settings, by simpler methods involving mild retraining of word embeddings and basic linear regression. The method of requires retraining with a substantial labeled dataset such as Paraphrase Database (, 2013). @PARASPLIT The current paper goes further, showing that the following completely unsupervised sentence embedding is a formidable baseline: Use word embeddings computed using one of the popular methods on unlabeled corpus like Wikipedia, represent the sentence by a weighted average of the word vectors, and then modify them a bit using PCA SVD. This weighting improves performance by about 10 to 30 in textual similarity tasks, and beats sophisticated supervised methods including RNN's and LSTM's. It even improves 's embeddings. This simple method should be used as the baseline to beat in future, especially when labeled training data is scarce or nonexistent. @PARASPLIT The paper also gives a theoretical explanation of the success of the above unsupervised method using a latent variable generative model for sentences, which is a simple extension of the model in (TACL'16) with new "smoothing" terms that allow for words occurring out of context, as well as high probabilities for words like and, not in all contexts.