Sparse Word Embeddings Using ℓ₁ Regularized Online Learning / 2915
Fei Sun, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan, Jun Xu, Xueqi Cheng

Recently, Word2Vec tool has attracted a lot of interest for its promising performances in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, a critical issue is that the dense word representations learned in Word2Vec are lacking of interpretability. It is natural to ask if one could improve their interpretability while keeping their performances. Inspired by the success of sparse models in enhancing interpretability, we propose to introduce sparse constraint into Word2Vec. Specifically, we take the Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) model as an example in our study and add the l1 regularizer into its learning objective. One challenge of optimization lies in that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) cannot directly produce sparse solutions with l1 regularizer in online training. To solve this problem, we employ the Regularized Dual Averaging (RDA) method, an online optimization algorithm for regularized stochastic learning. In this way, the learning process is very efficient and our model can scale up to very large corpus to derive sparse word representations. The proposed model is evaluated on both expressive power and interpretability. The results show that, compared with the original CBOW model, the proposed model can obtain state-of-the-art results with better interpretability using less than 10% non-zero elements.

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