Semantic Hilbert space for text representation learning

Capturing the meaning of sentences has long been a challenging task. Current models tend to apply linear combinations of word features to conduct semantic composition for bigger-granularity units e.g. phrases, sentences, and documents. However, the semantic linearity does not always hold in human language. For instance, the meaning of the phrase “ivory tower” cannot be deduced by linearly combining the meanings of “ivory” and “tower”. To address this issue, we propose a new framework that models different levels of semantic units (e.g. sememe, word, sentence, and semantic abstraction) on a single Semantic Hilbert Space, which naturally admits a non-linear semantic composition by means of a complex-valued vector word representation. An end-to-end neural network ¹ is proposed to implement the framework in the text classification task, and evaluation results on six benchmarking text classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness and self-explanation power of the proposed model. Furthermore, intuitive case studies are conducted to help end users to understand how the framework works.