Learning Numeral Embedding

Chengyue Jiang, Zhonglin Nian, Kaihao Guo, Shanbo Chu, Yinggong Zhao, Libin Shen, Kewei Tu


Abstract
Word embedding is an essential building block for deep learning methods for natural language processing. Although word embedding has been extensively studied over the years, the problem of how to effectively embed numerals, a special subset of words, is still underexplored. Existing word embedding methods do not learn numeral embeddings well because there are an infinite number of numerals and their individual appearances in training corpora are highly scarce. In this paper, we propose two novel numeral embedding methods that can handle the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) problem for numerals. We first induce a finite set of prototype numerals using either a self-organizing map or a Gaussian mixture model. We then represent the embedding of a numeral as a weighted average of the prototype number embeddings. Numeral embeddings represented in this manner can be plugged into existing word embedding learning approaches such as skip-gram for training. We evaluated our methods and showed its effectiveness on four intrinsic and extrinsic tasks: word similarity, embedding numeracy, numeral prediction, and sequence labeling.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.235
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2586–2599
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.235
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.235
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chengyue Jiang, Zhonglin Nian, Kaihao Guo, Shanbo Chu, Yinggong Zhao, Libin Shen, and Kewei Tu. 2020. Learning Numeral Embedding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 2586–2599, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Numeral Embedding (Jiang et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.235.pdf
Code
 jeffchy/learning-numeral-embeddings