TransDrift: Modeling Word-Embedding Drift using Transformer

Nishtha Madaan, Prateek Chaudhury, Nishant Kumar, Srikanta Bedathur

Abstract: In modern NLP applications, word embeddings are a crucial backbone that can be readily shared across a number of tasks. However, as the text distributions change and word semantics evolve over time, the downstream applications using the embeddings can suffer if the word representations do not conform to the data drift. Thus, maintaining word embeddings to be consistent with the underlying data distribution is a key problem. In this work, we tackle this problem and propose TransDrift\footnoteCodebase: https://github.com/data-iitd/transdrift, a transformer-based prediction model for word embeddings. Leveraging the flexibility of transformer, our model accurately learns the dynamics of the embedding drift and predicts the future embedding. In experiments, we compare with existing methods and show that our model makes significantly more accurate predictions of the word embedding than the baselines. Crucially, by applying the predicted embeddings as a backbone for downstream classification tasks, we show that our embeddings lead to superior performance compared to the previous methods.