Abstract
Linear transformation is a way to learn a linear relationship between two word embeddings, such that words in the two different embedding spaces can be semantically related. In this paper, we examine the reproducibility and generalisation of the linear transformation of word embeddings. Linear transformation is particularly useful when translating word embedding models in different languages, since it can capture the semantic relationships between two models. We first reproduce two linear transformation approaches, a recent one using orthogonal transformation and the original one using simple matrix transformation. Previous findings on a machine translation task are re-examined, validating that linear transformation is indeed an effective way to transform word embedding models in different languages. In particular, we show that the orthogonal transformation can better relate the different embedding models. Following the verification of previous findings, we then study the generalisation of linear transformation in a multi-language Twitter election classification task. We observe that the orthogonal transformation outperforms the matrix transformation. In particular, it significantly outperforms the random classifier by at least 10% under the F1 metric across English and Spanish datasets. In addition, we also provide best practices when using linear transformation for multi-language Twitter election classification.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, (ES/L016435/1). The authors would like to thank the assessors for their efforts in reviewing tweets.
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Yang, X., Ounis, I., McCreadie, R., Macdonald, C., Fang, A. (2018). On the Reproducibility and Generalisation of the Linear Transformation of Word Embeddings. In: Pasi, G., Piwowarski, B., Azzopardi, L., Hanbury, A. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10772. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_20
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