Unsupervised Post-processing of Word Vectors via Conceptor Negation

Abstract: Word vectors are at the core of many natural language processing tasks. Recently, there has been interest in post-processing word vectors to enrich their semantic information. In this paper, we introduce a novel word vector post-processing technique based on matrix conceptors (Jaeger2014), a family of regularized identity maps. More concretely, we propose to use conceptors to suppress those latent features of word vectors having high variances. The proposed method is purely unsupervised: it does not rely on any corpus or external linguistic database. We evaluate the post-processed word vectors on a battery of intrinsic lexical evaluation tasks, showing that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art alternatives. We also show that post-processed word vectors can be used for the downstream natural language processing task of dialogue state tracking, yielding improved results in different dialogue domains.