Volkan Cirik, M.S. 2014

Current position: PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh (LinkedIn).
M.S. Thesis: Analysis of SCODE Word Embeddings based on Substitute Distributions in Supervised Tasks. Koç University, Department of Computer Engineering. August, 2014. (PDF, Presentation, word vectors (github), word vectors (dropbox))
Publications: bibtex.php




Abstract
One of the interests of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community is to find representations for lexical items using large amount of unlabeled data. Inducing low-dimensional, continuous, dense word vectors, or word embeddings, have become the principal technique to find representations for words. Word embeddings address the issues of the classical categorical representation of words by capturing syntactic and semantic information of words in the dimensions of a vector. These representations are shown to be successful across NLP tasks including Named Entity Recognition, Part-of-speech Tagging, Parsing, and Semantic Role Labeling.

In this work, I analyze a word embedding method in supervised Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The framework maps words on a sphere such that words co-occurring in similar contexts lie closely. The similarity of contexts is measured by the distribution of substitutes that can fill them. I compared word embeddings, including more recent representations, in Named Entity Recognition (NER), Chunking, and Dependency Parsing. I examine the framework in a multilingual setup as well. The results show that the examined method achieves as good as or better results compared to the other word embeddings. The framework is consistent in improving the baseline systems across languages and achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual dependency parsing.