{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/re-evaluating-word-mover-s-distance","title":"Re-evaluating Word Mover's Distance","arxiv_id":"2105.14403","date":"2021-05-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ryoma Sato","Makoto Yamada","Hisashi Kashima"],"abstract":"The word mover's distance (WMD) is a fundamental technique for measuring the similarity of two documents. As the crux of WMD, it can take advantage of the underlying geometry of the word space by employing an optimal transport formulation. The original study on WMD reported that WMD outperforms classical baselines such as bag-of-words (BOW) and TF-IDF by significant margins in various datasets. In this paper, we point out that the evaluation in the original study could be misleading. We re-evaluate the performances of WMD and the classical baselines and find that the classical baselines are competitive with WMD if we employ an appropriate preprocessing, i.e., L1 normalization. In addition, we introduce an analogy between WMD and L1-normalized BOW and find that not only the performance of WMD but also the distance values resemble those of BOW in high dimensional spaces.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.14403v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.14403v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"re-evaluating-word-mover-s-distance","repo_url":"https://github.com/joisino/reeval-wmd","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2105.14403","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2105.14403","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2105.14403"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/joisino/reeval-wmd","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/mkusner/wmd","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"unverified":2},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"37a9a64213954c63","entry":"knn_evaluation","repo":"joisino/reeval-wmd","repo_kind":"official","path":"util.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joisino/reeval-wmd/blob/HEAD/util.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"37a9a64213954c63"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"6ca4e568c0d215d4","entry":"select_k","repo":"joisino/reeval-wmd","repo_kind":"official","path":"util.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joisino/reeval-wmd/blob/HEAD/util.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"6ca4e568c0d215d4"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}