Papers › Problems With Evaluation of Word Embeddings Using Word Similarity Tasks

Problems With Evaluation of Word Embeddings Using Word Similarity Tasks

8 May 2016WS 2016 8arXiv:1605.02276archive 2025-07-28

Manaal Faruqui, Yulia Tsvetkov, Pushpendre Rastogi, Chris Dyer

Lacking standardized extrinsic evaluation methods for vector representations of words, the NLP community has relied heavily on word similarity tasks as a proxy for intrinsic evaluation of word vectors. Word similarity evaluation, which correlates the distance between vectors and human judgments of semantic similarity is attractive, because it is computationally inexpensive and fast. In this paper we present several problems associated with the evaluation of word vectors on word similarity datasets, and summarize existing solutions. Our study suggests that the use of word similarity tasks for evaluation of word vectors is not sustainable and calls for further research on evaluation methods.

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Semantic SimilaritySemantic Textual SimilarityWord EmbeddingsWord Similarity

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