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These word embeddings keep on yielding all kinds of amazing benefits. Is there any kind of explainability research to help people understand them better in term

by schoen 8y ago

These word embeddings keep on yielding all kinds of amazing benefits. Is there any kind of explainability research to help people understand them better in terms of human psychology?

yorwba 8y ago
Word embeddings work because they reflect co-occurrences. I don't know whether that counts as an explanation in terms of psychology, but humans tend to put related things together. In a newspaper the articles aren't jumbled together, but there are sections on different topics, and in each section the articles are clearly delineated instead of mixing their sentences and each sentence represents a single unit instead of giving partial information on a dozen unrelated things. It might seem obvious that things should be done that way, but if you consider servers hosting lots of different websites on the same physical machine, or data structures spread out over several memory allocations held together by pointers, it's clear that there are other possibilities. So it does seem to be specific to the way humans use language. And because human language has this property of co-occurrences corresponding to relatedness in meaning, you can represent the meaning of a word by building a model that only predicts the probability that two words occur together.
- PeterisP 8y ago
  In linguistics, there's a classic principle "You shall know a word by the company it keeps" (Firth, J. R. 1957) - colocations (a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance) are very informative about what a word means.
dmreedy 8y ago
Not so much in psych, where language remains a pretty fundamental mystery, but from the philosophy of language side, word embeddings are, I think it's fair to say, fundamentally an implementation of Sassurian structuralism and semiotics. Words (signs) have no intrinsic, native meaning. And so, the only way to figure out which one is which is by measuring it in relation to all other signs in the lexicon; that is to say, words only mean something because they don't mean all the other things, and that the Structure as a whole is what provides meaning. There has been much in the way of discussion for, and concern about (for example, the Deconstructionist movement), these ideas, for the past 60 years or so. And a bit of practical exploration in the field of child development. Interestingly, the fact that embeddings between languages seem to share some common shapes (per the linked paper in this thread), would seem to suggest that A) Fundamentally, most languages have the same deep structure, whether through coincidence or common evolutionary root. or B) The brain has a hard-wired structure for language, evolved alongside the development of language itself. The Chomskian Language Acquisition Device. We're not born tabula rasa, we've got some hardcoding indicating how we're going to understand things Or a little of A, a little of B maybe, as it does end up being a boostrapping problem.

by schoen 8y ago

These word embeddings keep on yielding all kinds of amazing benefits. Is there any kind of explainability research to help people understand them better in terms of human psychology?

yorwba 8y ago

Word embeddings work because they reflect co-occurrences. I don't know whether that counts as an explanation in terms of psychology, but humans tend to put related things together. In a newspaper the articles aren't jumbled together, but there are sections on different topics, and in each section the articles are clearly delineated instead of mixing their sentences and each sentence represents a single unit instead of giving partial information on a dozen unrelated things. It might seem obvious that things should be done that way, but if you consider servers hosting lots of different websites on the same physical machine, or data structures spread out over several memory allocations held together by pointers, it's clear that there are other possibilities. So it does seem to be specific to the way humans use language. And because human language has this property of co-occurrences corresponding to relatedness in meaning, you can represent the meaning of a word by building a model that only predicts the probability that two words occur together.

PeterisP 8y ago
In linguistics, there's a classic principle "You shall know a word by the company it keeps" (Firth, J. R. 1957) - colocations (a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance) are very informative about what a word means.

dmreedy 8y ago

Not so much in psych, where language remains a pretty fundamental mystery, but from the philosophy of language side, word embeddings are, I think it's fair to say, fundamentally an implementation of Sassurian structuralism and semiotics. Words (signs) have no intrinsic, native meaning. And so, the only way to figure out which one is which is by measuring it in relation to all other signs in the lexicon; that is to say, words only mean something because they don't mean all the other things, and that the Structure as a whole is what provides meaning. There has been much in the way of discussion for, and concern about (for example, the Deconstructionist movement), these ideas, for the past 60 years or so. And a bit of practical exploration in the field of child development. Interestingly, the fact that embeddings between languages seem to share some common shapes (per the linked paper in this thread), would seem to suggest that A) Fundamentally, most languages have the same deep structure, whether through coincidence or common evolutionary root. or B) The brain has a hard-wired structure for language, evolved alongside the development of language itself. The Chomskian Language Acquisition Device. We're not born tabula rasa, we've got some hardcoding indicating how we're going to understand things Or a little of A, a little of B maybe, as it does end up being a boostrapping problem.