A Walk-Based Semantically Enriched Tree Kernel Over Distributed Word Representations

Shashank Srivastava, Dirk Hovy, Eduard H. Hovy

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a walk-based graph kernel that generalizes the notion of treekernels to continuous spaces. Our proposed approach subsumes a general framework for word-similarity, and in particular, provides a flexible way to incorporate distributed representations. Using vector representations, such an approach captures both distributional semantic similarities among words as well as the structural relations between them (encoded as the structure of the parse tree). We show an efficient formulation to compute this kernel using simple matrix operations. We present our results on three diverse NLP tasks, showing state-of-the-art results.