Papers › A La Carte Embedding: Cheap but Effective Induction of Semantic Feature Vectors

A La Carte Embedding: Cheap but Effective Induction of Semantic Feature Vectors

14 May 2018ACL 2018 7arXiv:1805.05388archive 2025-07-28

Mikhail Khodak, Nikunj Saunshi, YIngyu Liang, Tengyu Ma, Brandon Stewart, Sanjeev Arora

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.

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Tasks

Document ClassificationDomain AdaptationSentiment AnalysisText ClassificationTransfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Sentiment Analysis CR byte mLSTM7 Accuracy 90.6 #5 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis MPQA byte mLSTM7 Accuracy 88.8 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis MR byte mLSTM7 Accuracy 86.8 #4 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis SST-2 Binary classification byte mLSTM7 Accuracy 91.7 #49 of 87 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis SST-5 Fine-grained classification byte mLSTM7 Accuracy 54.6 #9 of 31 Archive leaderboard report
Subjectivity Analysis SUBJ byte mLSTM7 Accuracy 94.7 #8 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification TREC-6 byte mLSTM7 Error 9.6 #18 of 19 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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