Despite the fast developmental pace of new sentence embedding methods, it is still challenging to find comprehensive evaluations of these different techniques. In the past years, we saw significant improvements in the field of sentence embeddings and especially towards the development of universal sentence encoders that could provide inductive transfer to a wide variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of recent methods using a wide variety of downstream and linguistic feature probing tasks. We show that a simple approach using bag-of-words with a recently introduced language model for deep context-dependent word embeddings proved to yield better results in many tasks when compared to sentence encoders trained on entailment datasets. We also show, however, that we are still far away from a universal encoder that can perform consistently across several downstream tasks.
Two main challenges exist when learning high-quality representations: they should capture semantic and syntax and the different meanings the word can represent in different contexts (polysemy). To solve these two issues, Embedding from Language Models (ELMo) @cite_35 was recently introduced. It uses representations from a bi-directional LSTM that is trained with a language model (LM) objective on a large text dataset. ELMo @cite_35 representations are a function of the internal layers of the bi-directional Language Model (biLM), which provides a very rich representation about the tokens.
@cite_35
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We introduce a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). Our word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. We show that these representations can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems, including question answering, textual entailment and sentiment analysis. We also present an analysis showing that exposing the deep internals of the pre-trained network is crucial, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals. We introduce a new type of deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). Our word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pretrained on a large text corpus. We show that these representations can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across six challenging NLP problems, including question answering, textual entailment and sentiment analysis. We also present an analysis showing that exposing the deep internals of the pretrained network is crucial, allowing downstream models to mix different types of semi-supervision signals. We propose a new model for learning bilingual word representations from nonparallel document-aligned data. Following the recent advances in word representation learning, our model learns dense real-valued word vectors, that is, bilingual word embeddings (BWEs). Unlike prior work on inducing BWEs which heavily relied on parallel sentence-aligned corpora and or readily available translation resources such as dictionaries, the article reveals that BWEs may be learned solely on the basis of document-aligned comparable data without any additional lexical resources nor syntactic information. We present a comparison of our approach with previous state-of-the-art models for learning bilingual word representations from comparable data that rely on the framework of multilingual probabilistic topic modeling (MuPTM), as well as with distributional local context-counting models. We demonstrate the utility of the induced BWEs in two semantic tasks: (1) bilingual lexicon extraction, (2) suggesting word translations in context for polysemous words. Our simple yet effective BWE-based models significantly outperform the MuPTM-based and context-counting representation models from comparable data as well as prior BWE-based models, and acquire the best reported results on both tasks for all three tested language pairs. Recent work in learning bilingual representations tend to tailor towards achieving good performance on bilingual tasks, most often the crosslingual document classification (CLDC) evaluation, but to the detriment of preserving clustering structures of word representations monolingually. In this work, we propose a joint model to learn word representations from scratch that utilizes both the context coocurrence information through the monolingual component and the meaning equivalent signals from the bilingual constraint. Specifically, we extend the recently popular skipgram model to learn high quality bilingual representations efficiently. Our learned embeddings achieve a new state-of-the-art accuracy of 80.3 for the German to English CLDC task and a highly competitive performance of 90.7 for the other classification direction. At the same time, our models outperform best embeddings from past bilingual representation work by a large margin in the monolingual word similarity evaluation. 1