# 2013 DistributedRepresentationsofWor

Subject Headings: Noise Contrastive Estimation, Subsampling Frequent Words.

## Quotes

### Abstract

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 improvements that make the Skip-gram model more expressive and enable it to learn higher quality vectors more rapidly. We show that by subsampling frequent words we obtain significant speedup, and also learn higher quality representations as measured by our tasks. We also introduce Negative Sampling, a simplified variant of Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) that learns more accurate vectors for frequent words compared to the hierarchical softmax. 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 and efficient method for finding phrases, and show that their vector representations can be accurately learned by the Skip-gram model.

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### 3 Empirical Results

In this section we evaluate the Hierarchical Softmax (HS), Noise Contrastive Estimation, Negative Sampling, and subsampling of the training words. We used the analogical reasoning task1 introduced by Mikolov et al. [8]. The task consists of analogies such as “Germany”: “Berlin”:: “France”: ?, which are solved by finding a vector x such that vec (x) is closest to vec (“Berlin”) - vec (“Germany”) + vec (“France”) according to the cosine distance (we discard the input words from the search). This specific example is considered to have been answered correctly if x is “Paris”. The task has two broad categories: the syntactic analogies (such as “quick”: “quickly”:: “slow”: “slowly”) and the semantic analogies, such as the country to capital city relationship.

For training the Skip-gram models, we have used a large dataset consisting of various news articles (an internal Google dataset with one billion words). We discarded from the vocabulary all words that occurred5 times in the training data, which resulted in a vocabulary of size 692K. The performance of various Skip-gram models on the word analogy test set is reported in Table 1. The table shows that Negative Sampling outperforms the Hierarchical Softmax on the analogical reasoning task, and has even slightly better performance than the Noise Contrastive Estimation. The subsampling of the frequent words improves the training speed several times and makes the word representations significantly more accurate.

It can be argued that the linearity of the skip-gram model makes its vectors more suitable for such linear analogical reasoning, but the results of Mikolov et al. [8] also show that the vectors learned by the standard sigmoidal recurrent neural networks (which are highly non-linear) improve on this task significantly as the amount of the training data increases, suggesting that non-linearmodels also have a preference for a linear structure of the word representations.

### 4 Learning Phrases

As discussed earlier, many phrases have a meaning that is not a simple composition of the meanings of its individual words. To learn vector representation for phrases, we first find words that appear frequently together, and infrequently in other contexts. For example, “New York Times” and “Toronto Maple Leafs” are replaced by unique tokens in the training data, while a bigram “this is” will remain unchanged.

This way, we can form many reasonable phrases without greatly increasing the size of the vocabulary; in theory, we can train the Skip-gram model using all n-grams, but that would be too memory intensive. Many techniques have been previously developed to identify phrases in the text; however, it is out of scope of our work to compare them. We decided to use a simple data-driven approach, where phrases are formed based on the unigram and bigram counts, using

$\operatorname{score} (w_i, w_j) = \frac{\text{count} (w_j) - \delta}{\text{count} (w_i) \times \text{count} (w_j) }. \ (6)$

The \ delta is used as a discounting coefficient and prevents too many phrases consisting of very infrequent words to be formed. The bigrams with score above the chosen threshold are then used as phrases. Typically, we run 2-4 passes over the training data with decreasing threshold value, allowing longer phrases that consists of several words to be formed. We evaluate the quality of the phrase representations using a new analogical reasoning task that involves phrases. Table 2 shows examples of the five categories of analogies used in this task. This dataset is publicly available on the web [1].

#### 4.1 Phrase Skip-Gram Results

Starting with the same news data as in the previous experiments, we first constructed the phrase based training corpus and then we trained several Skip-gram models using different hyperparameters. As before, we used vector dimensionality 300 and context size 5. This setting already achieves good performance on the phrase dataset, and allowed us to quickly compare the Negative Sampling and the Hierarchical Softmax, both with and without subsampling of the frequent tokens. The results are summarized in Table 3.

The results show that while Negative Sampling achieves a respectable accuracy even with k = 5, using k = 15 achieves considerably better performance. Surprisingly, while we found the Hierarchical Softmax to achieve lower performance when trained without subsampling, it became the best performing method when we downsampled the frequent words. This shows that the subsampling can result in faster training and can also improve accuracy, at least in some cases.

## References

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volumeDate ValuetitletypejournaltitleUrldoinoteyear
2013 DistributedRepresentationsofWorDistributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality2014
1. http://code.google.com/p / word2vec / source / browse / trunk / questions-phrases.txt
 Author Tomáš Mikolov +, Ilya Sutskever +, Kai Chen +, Greg S Corrado + and Jeff Dean + title Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality + year 2014 +