Title: All-but-the-Top: Simple and Effective Postprocessing for Word Representations,
Abstract: Real-valued word representations have transformed NLP applications; popular
examples are word2vec and GloVe, recognized for their ability to capture
linguistic regularities. In this paper, we demonstrate a {\em very simple}, and
yet counter-intuitive, postprocessing technique -- eliminate the common mean
vector and a few top dominating directions from the word vectors -- that
renders off-the-shelf representations {\em even stronger}. The postprocessing
is empirically validated on a variety of lexical-level intrinsic tasks (word
similarity, concept categorization, word analogy) and sentence-level tasks
(semantic textural similarity and { text classification}) on multiple datasets
and with a variety of representation methods and hyperparameter choices in
multiple languages; in each case, the processed representations are
consistently better than the original ones.