Knowledge-powered deep learning for word embedding

Abstract

The basis of applying deep learning to solve natural language processing tasks is to obtain high-quality distributed representations of words, i.e., word embeddings, from large amounts of text data. However, text itself usually contains incomplete and ambiguous information, which makes necessity to leverage extra knowledge to understand it. Fortunately, text itself already contains well-defined morphological and syntactic knowledge; moreover, the large amount of texts on the Web enable the extraction of plenty of semantic knowledge. Therefore, it makes sense to design novel deep learning algorithms and systems in order to leverage the above knowledge to compute more effective word embeddings. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on the capacity of leveraging morphological, syntactic, and semantic knowledge to achieve high-quality word embeddings. Our study explores these types of knowledge to define new basis for word representation, provide additional input information, and serve as auxiliary supervision in deep learning, respectively. Experiments on an analogical reasoning task, a word similarity task, and a word completion task have all demonstrated that knowledge-powered deep learning can enhance the effectiveness of word embedding. © 2014 Springer-Verlag.