Learning Phrase Embeddings from Paraphrases with GRUs

Abstract: Learning phrase representations has been widely explored in many NLP tasks (e.g., Sentiment Analysis, Machine Translation) and has shown promising improvements. Previous studies either learn non-compositional phrase representations with general word embedding learning techniques or learn compositional phrase representations based on syntactic structures, which either require huge amounts of human annotations or cannot be easily generalized to all phrases. In this work, we propose to take advantage of large-scaled paraphrase database and present a pair-wise gated recurrent units (pairwise-GRU) framework to generate compositional phrase representations. Our framework can be re-used to generate representations for any phrases. Experimental results show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on several phrase similarity tasks.