A Method for Taxonomy-Aware Embeddings Evaluation (Student Abstract)

Navid Nobani, Lorenzo Malandri, Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica

Abstract: While word embeddings have been showing their effectiveness in capturing semantic and lexical similarities in a large number of domains, in case the corpus used to generate embeddings is associated with a taxonomy (i.e., classification tasks over standard de-jure taxonomies) the common intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation tasks cannot guarantee that the generated embeddings are consistent with the taxonomy. This, as a consequence sharply limits the use of distributional semantics in those domains. To address this issue, we design and implement MEET, which proposes a new measure -HSS- that allows evaluating embeddings from a text corpus preserving the semantic similarity relations of the taxonomy.