Boosting Tricks for Word Mover's Distance

Konstantinos Skianis, Fragkiskos D. Malliaros, Nikolaos Tziortziotis, Michalis Vazirgiannis

Abstract: Word embeddings have opened a new path in creating novel approaches for addressing traditional problems in the natural language processing (NLP) domain. However, using word embeddings to compare text documents remains a relatively unexplored topic—with Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) being the prominent tool used so far. In this paper, we present a variety of tools that can further improve the computation of distances between documents based on WMD. We demonstrate that, alternative stopwords, cross document-topic comparison, deep contextualized word vectors and convex metric learning, constitute powerful tools that can boost WMD.