SemGloVe: Semantic Co-occurrences for GloVe from BERT

Abstract: GloVe learns word embeddings by leveraging statistical information from word co-occurrence matrices. However, word pairs in the matrices are extracted from a predefined local context window, which might lead to limited word pairs and potentially semantic irrelevant word pairs. In this paper, we propose SemGloVe, which distills semantic co-occurrences from BERT into static GloVe word embeddings. Particularly, we propose two models to extract co-occurrence statistics based on either the masked LLM or the multi-head attention weights of BERT. Our methods can extract word pairs without limiting by the local window assumption and can define the co-occurrence weights by directly considering the semantic distance between word pairs. Experiments on several word similarity datasets and four external tasks show that SemGloVe can outperform GloVe.