Rare Words Degenerate All Words

Despite advances in neural network language model, the representation degeneration problem of embeddings is still challenging. Recent studies have found that the learned output embeddings are degenerated into a narrow-cone distribution which makes the similarity between each embeddings positive. They analyzed the cause of the degeneration problem has been demonstrated as common to most embeddings. However, we found that the degeneration problem is especially originated from the training of embeddings of rare words. In this study, we analyze the intrinsic mechanism of the degeneration of rare word embeddings with respect of their gradient about the negative log-likelihood loss function. Furthermore, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that the degeneration of rare word embeddings causes the degeneration of non-rare word embeddings, and that the overall degeneration problem can be alleviated by preventing the degeneration of rare word embeddings. Based on our analyses, we propose a novel method, Adaptive Gradient Partial Scaling(AGPS), to address the degeneration problem. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively.