Abstract
Distributed representations of words play a major role in the field of natural language processing by encoding semantic and syntactic information of words. However, most existing works on learning word representations typically regard words as individual atomic units and thus are blind to subword information in words. This further gives rise to a difficulty in representing out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we present a character-based word representation approach to deal with these limitations. The proposed model learns to generate word representations from characters. In our model, we employ a convolutional neural network and a highway network over characters to extract salient features effectively. Unlike previous models that learn word representations from a large corpus, we take a set of pre-trained word embeddings and generalize it to word entries, including OOV words. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model, we perform both an intrinsic and an extrinsic task which are word similarity and language modeling, respectively. Experimental results show clearly that the proposed model significantly outperforms strong baseline models that regard words or their subwords as atomic units. For example, we achieve as much as 18.5% improvement on average in perplexity for morphologically rich languages compared to strong baselines in the language modeling task.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | COLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings |
Editors | Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Pages | 2551-2561 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781948087506 |
Publication status | Published - 2018 |
Event | 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2018 - Santa Fe, United States Duration: 2018 Aug 20 → 2018 Aug 26 |
Publication series
Name | COLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings |
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Conference
Conference | 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, COLING 2018 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Santa Fe |
Period | 18/8/20 → 18/8/26 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT (number 2015R1A2A1A10052665).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 COLING 2018 - 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Proceedings. All rights reserved.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Computational Theory and Mathematics
- Linguistics and Language