Misspelling Oblivious Word Embeddings

NAACL 2019 · Bora Edizel, Aleksandra Piktus, Piotr Bojanowski, Rui Ferreira, Edouard Grave, Fabrizio Silvestri ·

In this paper we present a method to learn word embeddings that are resilient to misspellings. Existing word embeddings have limited applicability to malformed texts, which contain a non-negligible amount of out-of-vocabulary words. We propose a method combining FastText with subwords and a supervised task of learning misspelling patterns. In our method, misspellings of each word are embedded close to their correct variants. We train these embeddings on a new dataset we are releasing publicly. Finally, we experimentally show the advantages of this approach on both intrinsic and extrinsic NLP tasks using public test sets.