Bringing order to neural word embeddings with embeddings augmented by random permutations (EARP)

Abstract

Word order is clearly a vital part of human language, but it has been used comparatively lightly in distributional vector models. This paper presents a new method for incorporating word order information into word vector embedding models by combining the benefits of permutation-based order encoding with the more recent method of skip-gram with negative sampling. The new method introduced here is called Embeddings Augmented by Random Permutations (EARP). It operates by applying permutations to the coordinates of context vector representations during the process of training. Results show an 8% improvement in accuracy on the challenging Bigger Analogy Test Set, and smaller but consistent improvements on other analogy reference sets. These findings demonstrate the importance of order-based information in analogical retrieval tasks, and the utility of random permutations as a means to augment neural embeddings.