Frustratingly Easy Meta-Embedding -- Computing Meta-Embeddings by Averaging Source Word Embeddings

NAACL 2018 · Joshua Coates, Danushka Bollegala ·

Creating accurate meta-embeddings from pre-trained source embeddings has received attention lately. Methods based on global and locally-linear transformation and concatenation have shown to produce accurate meta-embeddings. In this paper, we show that the arithmetic mean of two distinct word embedding sets yields a performant meta-embedding that is comparable or better than more complex meta-embedding learning methods. The result seems counter-intuitive given that vector spaces in different source embeddings are not comparable and cannot be simply averaged. We give insight into why averaging can still produce accurate meta-embedding despite the incomparability of the source vector spaces.