Contrastive Loss is All You Need to Recover Analogies as Parallel Lines
Narutatsu Ri Fei-Tzin Lee Nakul Verma
While static word embedding models are known to represent linguistic
analogies as parallel lines in high-dimensional space, the underlying mechanism
as to why they result in such geometric structures remains obscure. We find
that an elementary contrastive-style method employed over distributional
information performs competitively with popular word embedding models on
analogy recovery tasks, while achieving dramatic speedups in training time.
Further, we demonstrate that a contrastive loss is sufficient to create these
parallel structures in word embeddings, and establish a precise relationship
between the co-occurrence statistics and the geometric structure of the
resulting word embeddings.