The strange geometry of skip-gram with negative sampling

Abstract

Despite their ubiquity, word embeddings trained with skip-gram negative sampling (SGNS) remain poorly understood. We find that vector positions are not simply determined by semantic similarity, but rather occupy a narrow cone, diametrically opposed to the context vectors. We show that this geometric concentration depends on the ratio of positive to negative examples, and that it is neither theoretically nor empirically inherent in related embedding algorithms.