No Arabic abstract
There is a great deal of work in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and computer science, about using word (or phrase) frequencies in context in text corpora to develop measures for word similarity or word association, going back to at least the 1960s. The goal of this chapter is to introduce the normalizedis a general way to tap the amorphous low-grade knowledge available for free on the Internet, typed in by local users aiming at personal gratification of diverse objectives, and yet globally achieving what is effectively the largest semantic electronic database in the world. Moreover, this database is available for all by using any search engine that can return aggregate page-count estimates for a large range of search-queries. In the paper introducing the NWD it was called `normalized Google distance (NGD), but since Google doesnt allow computer searches anymore, we opt for the more neutral and descriptive NWD. web distance (NWD) method to determine similarity between words and phrases. It
Semantic textual similarity is one of the open research challenges in the field of Natural Language Processing. Extensive research has been carried out in this field and near-perfect results are achieved by recent transformer-based models in existing benchmark datasets like the STS dataset and the SICK dataset. In this paper, we study the sentences in these datasets and analyze the sensitivity of various word embeddings with respect to the complexity of the sentences. We build a complex sentences dataset comprising of 50 sentence pairs with associated semantic similarity values provided by 15 human annotators. Readability analysis is performed to highlight the increase in complexity of the sentences in the existing benchmark datasets and those in the proposed dataset. Further, we perform a comparative analysis of the performance of various word embeddings and language models on the existing benchmark datasets and the proposed dataset. The results show the increase in complexity of the sentences has a significant impact on the performance of the embedding models resulting in a 10-20% decrease in Pearsons and Spearmans correlation.
A key principle in assessing textual similarity is measuring the degree of semantic overlap between two texts by considering the word alignment. Such alignment-based approaches are intuitive and interpretable; however, they are empirically inferior to the simple cosine similarity between general-purpose sentence vectors. To address this issue, we focus on and demonstrate the fact that the norm of word vectors is a good proxy for word importance, and their angle is a good proxy for word similarity. Alignment-based approaches do not distinguish them, whereas sentence-vector approaches automatically use the norm as the word importance. Accordingly, we propose a method that first decouples word vectors into their norm and direction, and then computes alignment-based similarity using earth movers distance (i.e., optimal transport cost), which we refer to as word rotators distance. Besides, we find how to grow the norm and direction of word vectors (vector converter), which is a new systematic approach derived from sentence-vector estimation methods. On several textual similarity datasets, the combination of these simple proposed methods outperformed not only alignment-based approaches but also strong baselines. The source code is available at https://github.com/eumesy/wrd
Words and phrases acquire meaning from the way they are used in society, from their relative semantics to other words and phrases. For computers the equivalent of `society is `database, and the equivalent of `use is `way to search the database. We present a new theory of similarity between words and phrases based on information distance and Kolmogorov complexity. To fix thoughts we use the world-wide-web as database, and Google as search engine. The method is also applicable to other search engines and databases. This theory is then applied to construct a method to automatically extract similarity, the Google similarity distance, of words and phrases from the world-wide-web using Google page counts. The world-wide-web is the largest database on earth, and the context information entered by millions of independent users averages out to provide automatic semantics of useful quality. We give applications in hierarchical clustering, classification, and language translation. We give examples to distinguish between colors and numbers, cluster names of paintings by 17th century Dutch masters and names of books by English novelists, the ability to understand emergencies, and primes, and we demonstrate the ability to do a simple automatic English-Spanish translation. Finally, we use the WordNet database as an objective baseline against which to judge the performance of our method. We conduct a massive randomized trial in binary classification using support vector machines to learn categories based on our Google distance, resulting in an a mean agreement of 87% with the expert crafted WordNet categories.
Vector space representations of words capture many aspects of word similarity, but such methods tend to make vector spaces in which antonyms (as well as synonyms) are close to each other. We present a new signed spectral normalized graph cut algorithm, signed clustering, that overlays existing thesauri upon distributionally derived vector representations of words, so that antonym relationships between word pairs are represented by negative weights. Our signed clustering algorithm produces clusters of words which simultaneously capture distributional and synonym relations. We evaluate these clusters against the SimLex-999 dataset (Hill et al.,2014) of human judgments of word pair similarities, and also show the benefit of using our clusters to predict the sentiment of a given text.
Word embedding models such as Skip-gram learn a vector-space representation for each word, based on the local word collocation patterns that are observed in a text corpus. Latent topic models, on the other hand, take a more global view, looking at the word distributions across the corpus to assign a topic to each word occurrence. These two paradigms are complementary in how they represent the meaning of word occurrences. While some previous works have already looked at using word embeddings for improving the quality of latent topics, and conversely, at using latent topics for improving word embeddings, such two-step methods cannot capture the mutual interaction between the two paradigms. In this paper, we propose STE, a framework which can learn word embeddings and latent topics in a unified manner. STE naturally obtains topic-specific word embeddings, and thus addresses the issue of polysemy. At the same time, it also learns the term distributions of the topics, and the topic distributions of the documents. Our experimental results demonstrate that the STE model can indeed generate useful topic-specific word embeddings and coherent latent topics in an effective and efficient way.