Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE): A Novel Document-level Representation

Radu Tudor Ionescu, Andrei Butnaru


Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel representation for text documents based on aggregating word embedding vectors into document embeddings. Our approach is inspired by the Vector of Locally-Aggregated Descriptors used for image representation, and it works as follows. First, the word embeddings gathered from a collection of documents are clustered by k-means in order to learn a codebook of semnatically-related word embeddings. Each word embedding is then associated to its nearest cluster centroid (codeword). The Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE) representation of a document is then computed by accumulating the differences between each codeword vector and each word vector (from the document) associated to the respective codeword. We plug the VLAWE representation, which is learned in an unsupervised manner, into a classifier and show that it is useful for a diverse set of text classification tasks. We compare our approach with a broad range of recent state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, we obtain a considerable improvement on the Movie Review data set, reporting an accuracy of 93.3%, which represents an absolute gain of 10% over the state-of-the-art approach.
Anthology ID:
N19-1033
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
363–369
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1033
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1033
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Radu Tudor Ionescu and Andrei Butnaru. 2019. Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE): A Novel Document-level Representation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 363–369, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE): A Novel Document-level Representation (Ionescu & Butnaru, NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1033.pdf
Code
 raduionescu/vlawe-boswe
Data
MRReuters-21578SUBJ