Paraphrases do not explain word analogies

EACL 2021  ·  Louis Fournier, Ewan Dunbar ·

Many types of distributional word embeddings (weakly) encode linguistic regularities as directions (the difference between "jump" and "jumped" will be in a similar direction to that of "walk" and "walked," and so on). Several attempts have been made to explain this fact. We respond to Allen and Hospedales' recent (ICML, 2019) theoretical explanation, which claims that word2vec and GloVe will encode linguistic regularities whenever a specific relation of paraphrase holds between the four words involved in the regularity. We demonstrate that the explanation does not go through: the paraphrase relations needed under this explanation do not hold empirically.

PDF Abstract EACL 2021 PDF EACL 2021 Abstract

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods