Retrofitting Sense-Specific Word Vectors Using Parallel Text

Jauhar et al. (2015) recently proposed to learn sense-specific word representations by “retrofitting” standard distributional word representations to an existing ontology. We observe that this approach does not require an ontology, and can be generalized to any graph defining word senses and relations between them. We create such a graph using translations learned from parallel corpora. On a set of lexical semantic tasks, representations learned using parallel text perform roughly as well as those derived from WordNet, and combining the two representation types significantly improves performance.