Binary Encoded Word Mover’s Distance

AbstractWord Mover’s Distance is a textual distance metric which calculates the minimum transport cost between two sets of word embeddings. This metric achieves impressive results on semantic similarity tasks, but is slow and difficult to scale due to the large number of floating point calculations. This paper demonstrates that by combining pre-existing lower bounds with binary encoded word vectors, the metric can be rendered highly efficient in terms of computation time and memory while still maintaining accuracy on several textual similarity tasks.