A Little History of Word Representation
As a semi-computer scientist, I always dream that we, humans, can make the computers understand what we say. Instead of writing sophisticated code or using other input devices (a mouse and a keyboard) to give instructions to computers, we can directly talk to a computer and give instructions. The first step to accomplish this science fiction scene is to let the computer understand what we say – natural languages, which is the ultimate target of natural language processing(NLP) research. The first step to making computers understand natural languages is to represent the fundamental element of natural language, words, as a form that computers can understand. This raises a big research direction in NLP: word representations. This is the sub-area I am interested most in NLP. In this series post, I am going to present some vital research work on this topic. ...