This paper proposes to address the word sense ambiguity issue in an unsupervised manner, where word sense representations are learned along a word sense selection mechanism given contexts. Prior work focused on designing a single model to deliver both mechanisms, and thus suffered from either coarse-grained representation learning or inefficient sense selection. The proposed modular approach, MUSE, implements flexible modules to optimize distinct mechanisms, achieving the first purely sense-level representation learning system with linear-time sense selection. We leverage reinforcement learning to enable joint training on the proposed modules, and introduce various exploration techniques on sense selection for better robustness. The experiments on benchmark data show that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on synonym selection as well as on contextual word similarities in terms of MaxSimC.
The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of "Canada" and "Air" cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada". Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible.