Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (NeurIPS 2019)
Yu Meng, Jiaxin Huang, Guangyuan Wang, Chao Zhang, Honglei Zhuang, Lance Kaplan, Jiawei Han
Unsupervised text embedding has shown great power in a wide range of NLP tasks. While text embeddings are typically learned in the Euclidean space, directional similarity is often more effective in tasks such as word similarity and document clustering, which creates a gap between the training stage and usage stage of text embedding. To close this gap, we propose a spherical generative model based on which unsupervised word and paragraph embeddings are jointly learned. To learn text embeddings in the spherical space, we develop an efficient optimization algorithm with convergence guarantee based on Riemannian optimization. Our model enjoys high efficiency and achieves state-of-the-art performances on various text embedding tasks including word similarity and document clustering.