Improving Distributed Representations of Tweets - Present and Future

Abstract: Unsupervised representation learning for tweets is an important research field which helps in solving several business applications such as sentiment analysis, hashtag prediction, paraphrase detection and microblog ranking. A good tweet representation learning model must handle the idiosyncratic nature of tweets which poses several challenges such as short length, informal words, unusual grammar and misspellings. However, there is a lack of prior work which surveys the representation learning models with a focus on tweets. In this work, we organize the models based on its objective function which aids the understanding of the literature. We also provide interesting future directions, which we believe are fruitful in advancing this field by building high-quality tweet representation learning models.

Twitter is a widely used microblogging platform, where users post and interact with messages, “tweets”. Understanding the semantic representation of tweets can benefit a plethora of applications such as sentiment analysis BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , hashtag prediction BIBREF2 , paraphrase detection BIBREF3 and microblog ranking BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 . However, tweets are difficult to model as they pose several challenges such as short length, informal words, unusual grammar and misspellings. Recently, researchers are focusing on leveraging unsupervised representation learning methods based on neural networks to solve this problem. Once these representations are learned, we can use off-the-shelf predictors taking the representation as input to solve the downstream task BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 . These methods enjoy several advantages: (1) they are cheaper to train, as they work with unlabelled data, (2) they reduce the dependence on domain level experts, and (3) they are highly effective across multiple applications, in practice.
Despite this, there is a lack of prior work which surveys the tweet-specific unsupervised representation learning models. In this work, we attempt to fill this gap by investigating the models in an organized fashion. Specifically, we group the models based on the objective function it optimizes. We believe this work can aid the understanding of the existing literature. We conclude the paper by presenting interesting future research directions, which we believe are fruitful in advancing this field by building high-quality tweet representation learning models.
There are various models spanning across different model architectures and objective functions in the literature to compute tweet representation in an unsupervised fashion. These models work in a semi-supervised way - the representations generated by the model is fed to an off-the-shelf predictor like Support Vector Machines (SVM) to solve a particular downstream task. These models span across a wide variety of neural network based architectures including average of word vectors, convolutional-based, recurrent-based and so on. We believe that the performance of these models is highly dependent on the objective function it optimizes – predicting adjacent word (within-tweet relationships), adjacent tweet (inter-tweet relationships), the tweet itself (autoencoder), modeling from structured resources like paraphrase databases and weak supervision. In this section, we provide the first of its kind survey of the recent tweet-specific unsupervised models in an organized fashion to understand the literature. Specifically, we categorize each model based on the optimized objective function as shown in Figure FIGREF1 . Next, we study each category one by one.
Motivation: Every tweet is assumed to have a latent topic vector, which influences the distribution of the words in the tweet. For example, though the appearance of the phrase catch the ball is frequent in the corpus, if we know that the topic of a tweet is about “technology”, we can expect words such as bug or exception after the word catch (ignoring the) instead of the word ball since catch the bug/exception is more plausible under the topic “technology”. On the other hand, if the topic of the tweet is about “sports”, then we can expect ball after catch. These intuitions indicate that the prediction of neighboring words for a given word strongly relies on the tweet also.
Models: BIBREF8 's work is the first to exploit this idea to compute distributed document representations that are good at predicting words in the document. They propose two models: PV-DM and PV-DBOW, that are extensions of Continuous Bag Of Words (CBOW) and Skip-gram model variants of the popular Word2Vec model BIBREF9 respectively – PV-DM inserts an additional document token (which can be thought of as another word) which is shared across all contexts generated from the same document; PV-DBOW attempts to predict the sampled words from the document given the document representation. Although originally employed for paragraphs and documents, these models work better than the traditional models: BOW BIBREF10 and LDA BIBREF11 for tweet classification and microblog retrieval tasks BIBREF12 . The authors in BIBREF12 make the PV-DM and PV-DBOW models concept-aware (a rich semantic signal from a tweet) by augmenting two features: attention over contextual words and conceptual tweet embedding, which jointly exploit concept-level senses of tweets to compute better representations. Both the discussed works have the following characteristics: (1) they use a shallow architecture, which enables fast training, (2) computing representations for test tweets requires computing gradients, which is time-consuming for real-time Twitter applications, and (3) most importantly, they fail to exploit textual information from related tweets that can bear salient semantic signals.
Motivation: To capture rich tweet semantics, researchers are attempting to exploit a type of sentence-level Distributional Hypothesis BIBREF10 , BIBREF13 . The idea is to infer the tweet representation from the content of adjacent tweets in a related stream like users' Twitter timeline, topical, retweet and conversational stream. This approach significantly alleviates the context insufficiency problem caused due to the ambiguous and short nature of tweets BIBREF0 , BIBREF14 .
Models: Skip-thought vectors BIBREF15 (STV) is a widely popular sentence encoder, which is trained to predict adjacent sentences in the book corpus BIBREF16 . Although the testing is cheap as it involves a cheap forward propagation of the test sentence, STV is very slow to train thanks to its complicated model architecture. To combat this computational inefficiency, FastSent BIBREF17 propose a simple additive (log-linear) sentence model, which predicts adjacent sentences (represented as BOW) taking the BOW representation of some sentence in context. This model can exploit the same signal, but at a much lower computational expense. Parallel to this work, Siamase CBOW BIBREF18 develop a model which directly compares the BOW representation of two sentence to bring the embeddings of a sentence closer to its adjacent sentence, away from a randomly occurring sentence in the corpus. For FastSent and Siamese CBOW, the test sentence representation is a simple average of word vectors obtained after training. Both of these models are general purpose sentence representation models trained on book corpus, yet give a competitive performance over previous models on the tweet semantic similarity computation task. BIBREF14 's model attempt to exploit these signals directly from Twitter. With the help of attention technique and learned user representation, this log-linear model is able to capture salient semantic information from chronologically adjacent tweets of a target tweet in users' Twitter timeline.
Motivation: In recent times, building representation models based on supervision from richly structured resources such as Paraphrase Database (PPDB) BIBREF19 (containing noisy phrase pairs) has yielded high quality sentence representations. These methods work by maximizing the similarity of the sentences in the learned semantic space.
Models: CHARAGRAM BIBREF20 embeds textual sequences by learning a character-based compositional model that involves addition of the vectors of its character n-grams followed by an elementwise nonlinearity. This simpler architecture trained on PPDB is able to beat models with complex architectures like CNN, LSTM on SemEval 2015 Twitter textual similarity task by a large margin. This result emphasizes the importance of character-level models that address differences due to spelling variation and word choice. The authors in their subsequent work BIBREF21 conduct a comprehensive analysis of models spanning the range of complexity from word averaging to LSTMs for its ability to do transfer and supervised learning after optimizing a margin based loss on PPDB. For transfer learning, they find models based on word averaging perform well on both the in-domain and out-of-domain textual similarity tasks, beating LSTM model by a large margin. On the other hand, the word averaging models perform well for both sentence similarity and textual entailment tasks, outperforming the LSTM. However, for sentiment classification task, they find LSTM (trained on PPDB) to beat the averaging models to establish a new state of the art. The above results suggest that structured resources play a vital role in computing general-purpose embeddings useful in downstream applications.
Motivation: The autoencoder based approach learns latent (or compressed) representation by reconstructing its own input. Since textual data like tweets contain discrete input signals, sequence-to-sequence models BIBREF22 like STV can be used to build the solution. The encoder model which encodes the input tweet can typically be a CNN BIBREF23 , recurrent models like RNN, GRU, LSTM BIBREF24 or memory networks BIBREF25 . The decoder model which generates the output tweet can typically be a recurrent model that predicts a output token at every time step.
Models: Sequential Denoising Autoencoders (SDAE) BIBREF17 is a LSTM-based sequence-to-sequence model, which is trained to recover the original data from the corrupted version. SDAE produces robust representations by learning to represent the data in terms of features that explain its important factors of variation. Tweet2Vec BIBREF3 is a recent model which uses a character-level CNN-LSTM encoder-decoder architecture trained to construct the input tweet directly. This model outperforms competitive models that work on word-level like PV-DM, PV-DBOW on semantic similarity computation and sentiment classification tasks, thereby showing that the character-level nature of Tweet2Vec is best-suited to deal with the noise and idiosyncrasies of tweets. Tweet2Vec controls the generalization error by using a data augmentation technique, wherein tweets are replicated and some of the words in the replicated tweets are replaced with their synonyms. Both SDAE and Tweet2Vec has the advantage that they don't need a coherent inter-sentence narrative (like STV), which is hard to obtain in Twitter.
Motivation: In a weakly supervised setup, we create labels for a tweet automatically and predict them to learn potentially sophisticated models than those obtained by unsupervised learning alone. Examples of labels include sentiment of the overall tweet, words like hashtag present in the tweet and so on. This technique can create a huge labeled dataset especially for building data-hungry, sophisticated deep learning models.
Models: BIBREF26 learns sentiment-specific word embedding (SSWE), which encodes the polarity information in the word representations so that words with contrasting polarities and similar syntactic context (like good and bad) are pushed away from each other in the semantic space that it learns. SSWE utilizes the massive distant-supervised tweets collected by positive and negative emoticons to build a powerful tweet representation, which are shown to be useful in tasks such as sentiment classification and word similarity computation in sentiment lexicon. BIBREF2 observes that hashtags in tweets can be considered as topics and hence tweets with similar hashtags must come closer to each other. Their model predicts the hashtags by using a Bi-GRU layer to embed the tweets from its characters. Due to subword modeling, such character-level models can approximate the representations for rare words and new words (words not seen during training) in the test tweets really well. This model outperforms the word-level baselines for hashtag prediction task, thereby concluding that exploring character-level models for tweets is a worthy research direction to pursue. Both these works fail to study the model's generality BIBREF27 , i.e., the ability of the model to transfer the learned representations to diverse tasks.
In this section we present the future research directions which we believe can be worth pursuing to generate high quality tweet embeddings.
In this work we study the problem of learning unsupervised tweet representations. We believe our survey of the existing works based on the objective function can give vital perspectives to researchers and aid their understanding of the field. We also believe the future research directions studied in this work can help in breaking the barriers in building high quality, general purpose tweet representation models.

Figure and table captions:
Figure 1: Unsupervised Tweet Representation Models Hierarchy based on Optimized Objective Function

Questions about this paper:
How do they encourage understanding of literature as part of their objective function?

Answers:
They group the existing works in terms of the objective function they optimize - within-tweet relationships, inter-tweet relationships, autoencoder, and weak supervision.