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comment by caeli
caeli  ·  3482 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Favorite Science Journal Articles

    And a paper last year found that this neural model, with its regularizer and everything, was actually implicitly performing matrix factorization on a matrix where cell (i,j) described how often word i and word j occur together. This was incredible, because NLP researchers had been using matrix factorization of this sort to find word embeddings for a long time, and this fancy new technique for learning embeddings suddenly had a clear intuition for why it worked!

This is really cool. PMI is a super useful measure, so it's nice that this model that works really well turns out to use it.