Improving Word Embeddings for Antonym Detection Using Thesauri and SentiWordNet

Abstract

Word embedding is a distributed representation of words in a vector space. It involves a mathematical embedding from a space with one dimension per word to a continuous vector space with much lower dimension. It performs well on tasks including synonym and hyponym detection by grouping similar words. However, most existing word embeddings are insensitive to antonyms, since they are trained based on word distributions in a large amount of text data, where antonyms usually have similar contexts. To generate word embeddings that are capable of detecting antonyms, we firstly modify the objective function of Skip-Gram model, and then utilize the supervised synonym and antonym information in thesauri as well as the sentiment information of each word in SentiWordNet. We conduct evaluations on three relevant tasks, namely GRE antonym detection, word similarity, and semantic textual similarity. The experiment results show that our antonym-sensitive embedding outperforms common word embeddings in these tasks, demonstrating the efficacy of our methods.