Papers › Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE): A Novel Document-level Representation

Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE): A Novel Document-level Representation

23 Feb 2019NAACL 2019 6arXiv:1902.08850archive 2025-07-28

Radu Tudor Ionescu, Andrei M. Butnaru

In this paper, we propose a novel representation for text documents based on aggregating word embedding vectors into document embeddings. Our approach is inspired by the Vector of Locally-Aggregated Descriptors used for image representation, and it works as follows. First, the word embeddings gathered from a collection of documents are clustered by k-means in order to learn a codebook of semnatically-related word embeddings. Each word embedding is then associated to its nearest cluster centroid (codeword). The Vector of Locally-Aggregated Word Embeddings (VLAWE) representation of a document is then computed by accumulating the differences between each codeword vector and each word vector (from the document) associated to the respective codeword. We plug the VLAWE representation, which is learned in an unsupervised manner, into a classifier and show that it is useful for a diverse set of text classification tasks. We compare our approach with a broad range of recent state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, we obtain a considerable improvement on the Movie Review data set, reporting an accuracy of 93.3%, which represents an absolute gain of 10% over the state-of-the-art approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/raduionescu/vlawe-boswe/.

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Tasks

Multi-Label Text ClassificationSentiment AnalysisSubjectivity AnalysisText ClassificationWord Embeddingstext-classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Document Classification Reuters-21578 VLAWE F1 89.3 #5 of 8 Archive leaderboard report
Multi-Label Text Classification Reuters-21578 VLAWE Micro-F1 89.3 #7 of 7 Archive leaderboard report
Sentiment Analysis MR VLAWE Accuracy 93.3 #1 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Subjectivity Analysis SUBJ VLAWE Accuracy 95.0 #6 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification MR VLAWE Accuracy 93.3 #1 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Text Classification TREC-6 VLAWE Error 5.8 #11 of 19 Archive leaderboard report

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