Imposing the style of one image onto another is called style transfer. For example, the style of a Van Gogh painting might be imposed on a photograph to yield an interesting hybrid. This paper applies the adaptive normalization used for image style transfer to language semantics, i.e., the style is the way the words are said (tone of voice and facial expressions) and these are style-transferred onto the text. The goal is to learn richer representations for multi-modal utterances using style-transferred multi-modal features. The proposed Style-Transfer Transformer (STT) grafts a stepped styled adaptive layer-normalization onto a transformer network, the output from which is used in sentiment analysis and emotion recognition problems. In addition to achieving performance on par with the state-of-the art (but using less than a third of the model parameters), we examine the relative contributions of each mode when used in the downstream applications.

Fine-tuning (FT) pre-trained sentence embedding models on small datasets has been shown to have limitations. In this paper we show that concatenating the embeddings from the pre-trained model with those from a simple sentence embedding model trained only on the target data, can improve over the performance of FT for few-sample tasks. To this end, a linear classifier is trained on the combined embeddings, either by freezing the embedding model weights or training the classifier and embedding models end-to-end. We perform evaluation on seven small datasets from NLP tasks and show that our approach with end-to-end training outperforms FT with negligible computational overhead. Further, we also show that sophisticated combination techniques like CCA and KCCA do not work as well in practice as concatenation. We provide theoretical analysis to explain this empirical observation.

We look into the task of generalizing word embeddings: given a set of pre-trained word vectors over a finite vocabulary, the goal is to predict embedding vectors for out-of-vocabulary words, without extra contextual information. We rely solely on the spellings of words and propose a model, along with an efficient algorithm, that simultaneously models subword segmentation and computes subword-based compositional word embedding. We call the model probabilistic bag-of-subwords (PBoS), as it applies bag-of-subwords for all possible segmentations based on their likelihood. Inspections and affix prediction experiment show that PBoS is able to produce meaningful subword segmentations and subword rankings without any source of explicit morphological knowledge. Word similarity and POS tagging experiments show clear advantages of PBoS over previous subword-level models in the quality of generated word embeddings across languages.

This paper proposes a way to improve the performance of existing algorithms for text classification in domains with strong language semantics. A proposed domain adaptation layer learns weights to combine a generic and a domain specific (DS) word embedding into a domain adapted (DA) embedding. The DA word embeddings are then used as inputs to a generic encoder + classifier framework to perform a downstream task such as classification. This adaptation layer is particularly suited to data sets that are modest in size, and which are, therefore, not ideal candidates for (re)training a deep neural network architecture. Results on binary and multi-class classification tasks using popular encoder architectures, including current state-of-the-art methods (with and without the shallow adaptation layer) show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Motivations like domain adaptation, transfer learning, and feature learning have fueled interest in inducing embeddings for rare or unseen words, n-grams, synsets, and other textual features. This paper introduces a la carte embedding, a simple and general alternative to the usual word2vec-based approaches for building such representations that is based upon recent theoretical results for GloVe-like embeddings. Our method relies mainly on a linear transformation that is efficiently learnable using pretrained word vectors and linear regression. This transform is applicable on the fly in the future when a new text feature or rare word is encountered, even if only a single usage example is available. We introduce a new dataset showing how the a la carte method requires fewer examples of words in context to learn high-quality embeddings and we obtain state-of-the-art results on a nonce task and some unsupervised document classification tasks.

Generic word embeddings are trained on large-scale generic corpora; Domain Specific (DS) word embeddings are trained only on data from a domain of interest. This paper proposes a method to combine the breadth of generic embeddings with the specificity of domain specific embeddings. The resulting embeddings, called Domain Adapted (DA) word embeddings, are formed by aligning corresponding word vectors using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) or the related nonlinear Kernel CCA. Evaluation results on sentiment classification tasks show that the DA embeddings substantially outperform both generic, DS embeddings when used as input features to standard or state-of-the-art sentence encoding algorithms for classification.

Word embeddings are ubiquitous in NLP and information retrieval, but it is unclear what they represent when the word is polysemous. Here it is shown that multiple word senses reside in linear superposition within the word embedding and simple sparse coding can recover vectors that approximately capture the senses. The success of our approach, which applies to several embedding methods, is mathematically explained using a variant of the random walk on discourses model (Arora et al., 2016). A novel aspect of our technique is that each extracted word sense is accompanied by one of about 2000 “discourse atoms” that gives a succinct description of which other words co-occur with that word sense. Discourse atoms can be of independent interest, and make the method potentially more useful. Empirical tests are used to verify and support the theory.

Generic word embeddings are trained on large-scale generic corpora; Domain Specific (DS) word embeddings are trained only on data from a domain of interest. This paper proposes a method to combine the breadth of generic embeddings with the specificity of domain specific embeddings. The resulting embeddings, called Domain Adapted (DA) word embeddings, are formed by first aligning corresponding word vectors using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) or the related nonlinear Kernel CCA (KCCA) and then combining them via convex optimization. Results from evaluation on sentiment classification tasks show that the DA embeddings substantially outperform both generic, DS embeddings when used as input features to standard or state-of-the-art sentence encoding algorithms for classification.

We approach the problem of generalizing pre-trained word embeddings beyond fixed-size vocabularies without using additional contextual information. We propose a subword-level word vector generation model that views words as bags of character n-grams. The model is simple, fast to train and provides good vectors for rare or unseen words. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances in English word similarity task and in joint prediction of part-of-speech tag and morphosyntactic attributes in 23 languages, suggesting our model’s ability in capturing the relationship between words’ textual representations and their embeddings.

Semantic word embeddings represent the meaning of a word via a vector, and are created by diverse methods. Many use nonlinear operations on co-occurrence statistics, and have hand-tuned hyperparameters and reweighting methods. This paper proposes a new generative model, a dynamic version of the log-linear topic model of Mnih and Hinton (2007). The methodological novelty is to use the prior to compute closed form expressions for word statistics. This provides a theoretical justification for nonlinear models like PMI, word2vec, and GloVe, as well as some hyperparameter choices. It also helps explain why low-dimensional semantic embeddings contain linear algebraic structure that allows solution of word analogies, as shown by Mikolov et al. (2013a) and many subsequent papers. Experimental support is provided for the generative model assumptions, the most important of which is that latent word vectors are fairly uniformly dispersed in space.