Question: What do the vector representations of words measure?
Evidence: This research addresses the problem of representing the semantics of text documents in multi-lingual comparable corpora. We present a new approach to this problem, based on neural embeddings, and test it on the task of clustering texts into meaningful classes depending on their topics. The setting is unsupervised, meaning that one either does not have enough annotated data to train a supervised classifier or does not want to be limited with a pre-defined set of classes. There is a lot of sufficiently good approaches to this problem in the case of mono-lingual text collections, but the presence of multiple languages introduces complications.
When a text collection contains documents in several languages, it becomes impractical to simply represent the documents as vectors of words occurring in them ("bag-of-words"), as the words surface forms are different, even in closely-related languages. Thus, one has to invent means to cross the inter-lingual gap and bring all documents to some sort of shared representation, without losing information about their topics or categories.
Of course, one obvious way to solve this problem is to translate all documents into one language, and then apply any clustering algorithm. However, this requires either buying human/machine translation services (which can be expensive if you deal with large text collection) or training own statistical machine translation model (which as a rule requires big parallel corpus). This is the reason to search for other solutions.
In this paper, a novel way of reducing the problem of cross-lingual document representation to a monolingual setting is proposed. Essentially, we train Continuous Bag-of-Words models BIBREF0 on large comparable monolingual corpora for two languages our dataset consists of. This provides us with vector representations of words, allowing to measure their semantic similarity. Then, a linear transformation matrix from vectors of language A to vectors of language B is learned, using a small bilingual dictionary as training data. This matrix is then employed to `project' word and document representations from semantic space of language A to semantic space of language B. It allows not only quite accurate `translation' of words, but also of document `semantic fingerprints' (dense representations of document semantics, calculated as an average of the trained distributional vectors for all the words in document).
This approach is evaluated in a setting, where the input is a collection of documents in several languages and some number of topics to which these documents belong (we also have large monolingual corpora to train distributional models on). For each document, we are given its language, but not its topic. The task is to cluster this collection so that documents belonging to one topic were clustered together, independent of their language. Note that we are interested in clustering the collection as a whole, not each language separately (which is trivial).
Our evaluation data consists of comparable corpora of Russian and Ukrainian academic texts. On this material, we show that the `translated semantic fingerprints' method represents documents in different languages precisely enough to allow almost exact clustering according to document topics, with only 5% of incorrect assignments. It significantly outperforms both naive bag-of-words baseline and the not-so-naive method of `orthographic translation' based on Damerau-Levenshtein distance, even enriched with dictionary mappings. At the same time, it does not require large parallel corpora or a ready-made statistical machine translation model.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In Section "Related Work" we describe the foundations of our approach and the related work. Section "Academic texts as Comparable Corpora" introduces the employed corpora and the story behind them. Section "Learning to Translate: Ukrainian-to-Russian transformations" is dedicated to learning the transformation matrix, and Section "Experiment Design and Evaluation" describes our experimental setting and evaluation results. We discuss the findings in Section "Discussion" and conclude in Section "Conclusion and Future Work" , also suggesting directions for future work.
This provides us with vector representations of words, allowing to measure their semantic similarity.
Answer: Semantic similarity of vector representations of words.