A Comprehensive Empirical Evaluation of Existing Word Embedding Approaches

Vector-based word representations help countless Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks capture both semantic and syntactic regularities of the language. In this paper, we present the characteristics of existing word embedding approaches and analyze them with regards to many classification tasks. We categorize the methods into two main groups - Traditional approaches mostly use matrix factorization to produce word representations, and they are not able to capture the semantic and syntactic regularities of the language very well. Neural-Network based approaches, on the other hand, can capture sophisticated regularities of the language and preserve the word relationships in the generated word representations. We report experimental results on multiple classification tasks and highlight the scenarios where one approach performs better than the rest.