A Syllable-based Technique for Word Embeddings of Korean Words
This addresses a domain-specific challenge in NLP for Korean language processing, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of word embeddings for morphologically complex Korean by proposing a syllable-based model using a convolutional neural network, which produces more meaningful representations and shows robustness to Out-of-Vocabulary issues compared to Skip-gram embeddings.
Word embedding has become a fundamental component to many NLP tasks such as named entity recognition and machine translation. However, popular models that learn such embeddings are unaware of the morphology of words, so it is not directly applicable to highly agglutinative languages such as Korean. We propose a syllable-based learning model for Korean using a convolutional neural network, in which word representation is composed of trained syllable vectors. Our model successfully produces morphologically meaningful representation of Korean words compared to the original Skip-gram embeddings. The results also show that it is quite robust to the Out-of-Vocabulary problem.