Radical and Stroke-Enhanced Chinese Word Embeddings Based on Neural Networks

The internal structural information of words has proven to be very effective for learning Chinese word embeddings. However, most previous attempts made a single form extraction of internal feature to learn representations, ignoring the comprehensive combination of such information. And they focused only on explicit feature of internal structures, even though these structures still have the implicit semantics of words. In this paper, we propose Radical and Stroke-enhanced Word Embeddings (RSWE), a novel method based on neural networks for learning Chinese word embeddings with joint guidance from semantic and morphological internal information. RSWE enables an embedding model to learn simultaneously from (1) implicit semantic information that is exploited from the radicals, and (2) stroke n-grams information that can be explicitly obtained from Chinese words. In the learning process, RSWE uses stroke n-grams to capture the local structural feature of words, and integrates the implicit information exploited from radicals to enhance the semantic of embeddings. Through this combination procedure, semantics of Chinese words are effectively transferred into the learned embeddings. We evaluate the effectiveness of RSWE on word similarity computation, word analogy reasoning, performance over dimensions, performance over learning corpus size, and named entity recognition tasks, the experimental results show that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches.