Learning Function-Specific Word Representations

Daniela Gerz, Ivan Vulić, Marek Rei, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen

TL;DR: Task-independent neural model for learning associations between interrelated groups of words.

Abstract: We present a neural framework for learning associations between interrelated groups of words such as the ones found in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structures. Our model induces a joint function-specific word vector space, where vectors of e.g. plausible SVO compositions lie close together. The model retains information about word group membership even in the joint space, and can thereby effectively be applied to a number of tasks reasoning over the SVO structure. We show the robustness and versatility of the proposed framework by reporting state-of-the-art results on the tasks of estimating selectional preference (i.e., thematic fit) and event similarity. The results indicate that the combinations of representations learned with our task-independent model outperform task-specific architectures from prior work, while reducing the number of parameters by up to 95%. The proposed framework is versatile and holds promise to support learning function-specific representations beyond the SVO structures.

Keywords: representation learning, associations, word embeddings, SVO, thematic fit, selectional preference