Online Learning of Task-specific Word Representations with a Joint Biconvex Passive-Aggressive Algorithm

Pascal Denis, Liva Ralaivola


Abstract
This paper presents a new, efficient method for learning task-specific word vectors using a variant of the Passive-Aggressive algorithm. Specifically, this algorithm learns a word embedding matrix in tandem with the classifier parameters in an online fashion, solving a bi-convex constrained optimization at each iteration. We provide a theoretical analysis of this new algorithm in terms of regret bounds, and evaluate it on both synthetic data and NLP classification problems, including text classification and sentiment analysis. In the latter case, we compare various pre-trained word vectors to initialize our word embedding matrix, and show that the matrix learned by our algorithm vastly outperforms the initial matrix, with performance results comparable or above the state-of-the-art on these tasks.
Anthology ID:
E17-1073
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
775–784
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1073
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pascal Denis and Liva Ralaivola. 2017. Online Learning of Task-specific Word Representations with a Joint Biconvex Passive-Aggressive Algorithm. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers, pages 775–784, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Online Learning of Task-specific Word Representations with a Joint Biconvex Passive-Aggressive Algorithm (Denis & Ralaivola, EACL 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-1073.pdf
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