Research Area:  Machine Learning

Abstract:

Many machine learning algorithms require the input to be represented as a fixed length feature vector. When it comes to texts, one of the most common representations is bag-of-words. Despite their popularity, bag-of-words models have two major weaknesses: they lose the ordering of the words and they also ignore semantics of the words. For example, "powerful," "strong" and "Paris" are equally distant. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised algorithm that learns vector representations of sentences and text documents. This algorithm represents each document by a dense vector which is trained to predict words in the document. Its construction gives our algorithm the potential to overcome the weaknesses of bag-of-words models. Empirical results show that our technique outperforms bag-of-words models as well as other techniques for text representations. Finally, we achieve new state-of-the-art results on several text classification and sentiment analysis tasks.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Quoc Le, Tomas Mikolov

Publisher name:  PMLR

DOI:  

Volume Information:  32(2):1188-1196

Paper Link:   https://proceedings.mlr.press/v32/le14.html