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Improving zero-shot learning by mitigating the hubness problem

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arxiv 1412.6568 v3 pith:L7L75S7I submitted 2014-12-20 cs.CL cs.LG

Improving zero-shot learning by mitigating the hubness problem

classification cs.CL cs.LG
keywords mappedvectorszero-shotcorrectimagelabelsneighboursproblem
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The zero-shot paradigm exploits vector-based word representations extracted from text corpora with unsupervised methods to learn general mapping functions from other feature spaces onto word space, where the words associated to the nearest neighbours of the mapped vectors are used as their linguistic labels. We show that the neighbourhoods of the mapped elements are strongly polluted by hubs, vectors that tend to be near a high proportion of items, pushing their correct labels down the neighbour list. After illustrating the problem empirically, we propose a simple method to correct it by taking the proximity distribution of potential neighbours across many mapped vectors into account. We show that this correction leads to consistent improvements in realistic zero-shot experiments in the cross-lingual, image labeling and image retrieval domains.

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Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

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