AUTHOR=Jaffe Ariel , Kluger Yuval , Lindenbaum Ofir , Patsenker Jonathan , Peterfreund Erez , Steinerberger Stefan TITLE=The Spectral Underpinning of word2vec JOURNAL=Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics VOLUME=6 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/applied-mathematics-and-statistics/articles/10.3389/fams.2020.593406 DOI=10.3389/fams.2020.593406 ISSN=2297-4687 ABSTRACT=

Word2vec introduced by Mikolov et al. is a word embedding method that is widely used in natural language processing. Despite its success and frequent use, a strong theoretical justification is still lacking. The main contribution of our paper is to propose a rigorous analysis of the highly nonlinear functional of word2vec. Our results suggest that word2vec may be primarily driven by an underlying spectral method. This insight may open the door to obtaining provable guarantees for word2vec. We support these findings by numerical simulations. One fascinating open question is whether the nonlinear properties of word2vec that are not captured by the spectral method are beneficial and, if so, by what mechanism.