Word Representations in Vector Space and their Applications for Arabic

Abstract

A lot of work has been done to give the individual words of a certain language adequate representations in vector space so that these representations capture semantic and syntactic properties of the language. In this paper, we compare different techniques to build vectorized space representations for Arabic, and test these models via intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations. Intrinsic evaluation assesses the quality of models using benchmark semantic and syntactic dataset, while extrinsic evaluation assesses the quality of models by their impact on two Natural Language Processing applications: Information retrieval and Short Answer Grading. Finally, we map the Arabic vector space to the English counterpart using Cosine error regression neural network and show that it outperforms standard mean square error regression neural networks in this task.