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1. Interactive Visualizations of Word Embeddings for K-12 Students

   Bandyopadhyay, Saptarashmi; Xu, Jason; Pawar, Neel; Touretzky, David (June 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Word embeddings, which represent words as dense feature vectors, are widely used in natural language processing. In their seminal paper on word2vec, Mikolov and colleagues showed that a feature space created by training a word prediction network on a large text corpus will encode semantic information that supports analogy by vector arithmetic, e.g., "king" minus "man" plus "woman" equals "queen". To help novices appreciate this idea, people have sought effective graphical representations of word embeddings.We describe a new interactive tool for visually exploring word embeddings. Our tool allows users to define semantic dimensions by specifying opposed word pairs, e.g., gender is defined by pairs such as boy/girl and father/mother, and age by pairs such as father/son and mother/daughter. Words are plotted as points in a zoomable and rotatable 3D space, where the third ”residual” dimension encodes distance from the hyperplane defined by all the opposed word vectors with age and gender subtracted out. Our tool allows users to visualize vector analogies, drawing the vector from “king” to “man” and a parallel vector from “woman” to “king-man+woman”, which is closest to “queen”. Visually browsing the embedding space and experimenting with this tool can make word embeddings more intuitive. We include a series of experiments teachers can use to help K-12 students appreciate the strengths and limitations of this representation. 

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2. Metaconcepts: Isolating Context in Word Embeddings

   https://doi.org/10.1109/MIPR.2019.00110  

   Sutor, Peter; Aloimonos, Yiannis; Fermuller, Cornelia; Summers-Stay, Douglas (March 2019, 2019 IEEE Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR))

   ord embeddings are commonly used to measure word-level semantic similarity in text, especially in direct word- to-word comparisons. However, the relationships between words in the embedding space are often viewed as approximately linear and concepts comprised of multiple words are a sort of linear combination. In this paper, we demonstrate that this is not generally true and show how the relationships can be better captured by leveraging the topology of the embedding space. We propose a technique for directly computing new vectors representing multiple words in a way that naturally combines them into a new, more consistent space where distance better correlates to similarity. We show that this technique works well for natural language, even when it comprises multiple words, on a simple task derived from WordNet synset descriptions and examples of words. Thus, the generated vectors better represent complex concepts in the word embedding space. 

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3. The strange geometry of skip-gram with negative sampling

   Mimno, David; Thompson, Laure (January 2017, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   Despite their ubiquity, word embeddings trained with skip-gram negative sampling (SGNS) remain poorly understood. We find that vector positions are not simply determined by semantic similarity, but rather occupy a narrow cone, diametrically opposed to the context vectors. We show that this geometric concentration depends on the ratio of positive to negative examples, and that it is neither theoretically nor empirically inherent in related embedding algorithms. 

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4. Whole-Word Segmental Speech Recognition with Acoustic Word Embeddings

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SLT48900.2021.9383578  

   Shi, Bowen; Settle, Shane; Livescu, Karen (January 2021, IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology)

   Segmental models are sequence prediction models in which scores of hypotheses are based on entire variable-length segments of frames. We consider segmental models for whole-word ("acoustic-to-word") speech recognition, with the feature vectors defined using vector embeddings of segments. Such models are computationally challenging as the number of paths is proportional to the vocabulary size, which can be orders of magnitude larger than when using subword units like phones. We describe an efficient approach for end-to-end whole-word segmental models, with forward-backward and Viterbi decoding performed on a GPU and a simple segment scoring function that reduces space complexity. In addition, we investigate the use of pre-training via jointly trained acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) and acoustically grounded word embeddings (AGWEs) of written word labels. We find that word error rate can be reduced by a large margin by pre-training the acoustic segment representation with AWEs, and additional (smaller) gains can be obtained by pre-training the word prediction layer with AGWEs. Our final models improve over prior A2W models. 

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5. Unsupervised Multilingual Word Embeddings

   Chen, Xilun; Cardie, Claire (January 2018, Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   Multilingual Word Embeddings (MWEs) represent words from multiple languages in a single distributional vector space. Unsupervised MWE (UMWE) methods acquire multilingual embeddings without cross-lingual supervision, which is a significant advantage over traditional supervised approaches and opens many new possibilities for low-resource languages. Prior art for learning UMWEs, however, merely relies on a number of independently trained Unsupervised Bilingual Word Embeddings (UBWEs) to obtain multilingual embeddings. These methods fail to leverage the interdependencies that exist among many languages. To address this shortcoming, we propose a fully unsupervised framework for learning MWEs1 that directly exploits the relations between all language pairs. Our model substantially outperforms previous approaches in the experiments on multilingual word translation and cross-lingual word similarity. In addition, our model even beats supervised approaches trained with cross-lingual resources. 

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