WHY?

Vector space word representations capture syntactic and semantic regularities in language well.

WHAT?

To test how continuous word representation capture regularities, this paper introduce relation-specific vector offset method. All the analogy tasks can be formulated as “a is to b as c is to __”. Synthetic test asks gramatical regularities such as base-comparative or singular-plural. Symantic test asks semantic regularities like “clothing is to shirt as dis is to bowl”.

To answer analogy question, vector offset method can be used to find the answer.

$$y = x_b - x_a + x_c\\ w* = argmax_w\frac{x_w y}{\|x_w\|\|y\|}$$

So?

RNNLM performed best in word analogy task.

Critic

Symantic test can be subjective.

Mikolov, Tomas, Wen-tau Yih, and Geoffrey Zweig. “Linguistic regularities in continuous space word representations.” Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2013.