Citations behind the Google Brain Word Vectors Approach

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Google’s Word Vectors Approach

In October of 2015, a new algorithm was announced by members of the Google Brain team, described in this post from Search Engine Land – Meet RankBrain: The Artificial Intelligence That’s Now Processing Google Search Results One of the Google Brain team members who gave Bloomberg News a long interview on Rankbrain, Gregory S. Corrado was a co-inventor on a word vectors patent that was granted this August along with other members of the Google Brain team.

In the SEM Post article, RankBrain: Everything We Know About Google’s AI Algorithm we are told that Rankbrain uses concepts from Geoffrey Hinton, involving Thought Vectors.

The summary in the description from the patent tells us about how a word vectors approach might be used in such a system:

Particular embodiments of the subject matter described in this specification can be implemented to realize one or more of the following advantages. First, unknown words in sequences of words can be effectively predicted if the surrounding words are known. Second, words surrounding a known word in a sequence of words can be effectively predicted. Third, numerical representations of words in a vocabulary of words can be easily and effectively generated. Fourth, the numerical representations can reveal semantic and syntactic similarities and relationships between the words that they represent.

By using a word prediction system having a two-layer architecture and by parallelizing the training process, the word prediction system can be effectively trained on extensive word corpora, e.g., corpora that contain on the order of 200 billion words, resulting in higher quality numeric representations than those that are obtained by training systems on relatively smaller word corpora. Further, words can be represented in very high-dimensional spaces, e.g., spaces on the order of 1000 dimensions, resulting in higher quality representations than when words are represented in relatively lower-dimensional spaces. Additionally, the time required to train the word prediction system can be greatly reduced.

So, an incomplete or ambiguous query that contains some words could use those words to predict missing words that may be related. Those predicted words could then be used to return search results that the original words might have difficulties returning. The patent that describes this Word Vectors Approach prediction process is:

Computing numeric representations of words in a high-dimensional space

Inventors: Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Gregory S. Corrado, and Jeffrey A. Dean
Assignee: Google Inc.
US Patent: 9,740,680
Granted: August 22, 2017
Filed: May 18, 2015

Abstract

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for computing numeric representations of words. One of the methods includes obtaining a set of training data, wherein the set of training data comprises sequences of words; training a classifier and an embedding function on the set of training data, wherein training the embedding function comprises obtained trained values of the embedding function parameters; processing each word in the vocabulary using the embedding function following the trained values of the embedding function parameters to generate a respective numerical representation of each word in the vocabulary in the high-dimensional space, and associating each word in the vocabulary with the respective numeric representation of the word in the high-dimensional space.

One of the things that I found interesting about this word vectors patent was that it includes several citations from the applicants for the patent. They looked worth reading, and many of them were co-authored by inventors of this patent, by people who are well-known in the field of artificial intelligence, or by people from Google. When I saw them, I started hunting for locations on the Web for them, and I was able to find copies of them. I will be reading through them and thought it would be helpful to share those links, which was the idea behind this post. It may be helpful to read as many of these as possible before tackling this patent. If anything stands out in any way to you, let us know what you’ve found interesting.

Citations behind this Word Vectors Approach:

Bengio and LeCun, “Scaling learning algorithms towards AI,” Large-Scale Kernel Machines, MIT Press, 41 pages, 2007. cited by the applicant.

Bengio et al., “A neural probabilistic language model,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, 3:1137-1155, 2003. cited by applicant .

Brants et al., “Large language models in machine translation,” Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Language Learning, 10 pages, 2007. cited by the applicant.

Collobert and Weston, “A Unified Architecture for Natural Language Processing: Deep Neural Networks with Multitask Learning,” International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML, 8 pages, 2008. cited by the applicant.

Collobert et al., “Natural Language Processing (Almost) from Scratch,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12:2493-2537, 2011. cited by the applicant.

Dean et al., “Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks,” Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, 9 pages, 2012. cited by the applicant.

Elman, “Finding Structure in Time,” Cognitive Science, 14, 179-211, 1990. cited by applicant .

Huang et al Improving Word Representations via Global Context and Multiple Word Prototypes,” Proc. Association for Computational Linguistics, 10 pages, 2012. cited by the applicant.

Mikolov and Zweig, “Linguistic Regularities in Continuous Space Word Representations,” submitted to NAACL HLT, 6 pages, 2012. cited by applicant .

Mikolov et al., “Empirical Evaluation and Combination of Advanced Language Modeling Techniques,” Proceedings of Interspeech, 4 pages, 2011. cited by the applicant.

Mikolov et al., “Extensions of recurrent neural network language model,” IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 5528-5531, May 22-27, 2011. cited by applicant .

Mikolov et al., “Neural network based language models for highly inflective languages,” Proc. ICASSP, 4 pages, 2009. cited by applicant .

Mikolov et al., “Recurrent neural network based language model,” Proceedings of Interspeech, 4 pages, 2010. cited by applicant .

Mikolov et al., “Strategies for Training Large Scale Neural Network Language Models,” Proc. Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, 6 pages, 2011. cited by the applicant.

Mikolov, “RNNLM Toolkit,” Faculty of Information Technology (FIT) of Brno University of Technology [online], 2010-2012 [retrieved on Jun. 16, 2014]. Retrieved from the Internet: < URL: http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/.about.imikolov/rnnlm/>, 3 pages. cited by applicant .

Mikolov, “Statistical Language Models based on Neural Networks,” PhD thesis, Brno University of Technology, 133 pages, 2012. cited by the applicant.

Mnih and Hinton, “A Scalable Hierarchical Distributed Language Model,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 21, MIT Press, 8 pages, 2009. cited by the applicant.

Morin and Bengio, “Hierarchical Probabilistic Neural Network Language Model,” AISTATS, 7 pages, 2005. cited by applicant .

Rumelhart et al., “Learning representations by back-propagating errors,” Nature, 323:533-536, 1986. cited by applicant .

Turian et al., “MetaOptimize / projects / wordreprs /” Metaoptimize.com [online], captured on Mar. 7, 2012. Retrieved from the Internet using the Wayback Machine: < URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20120307230641/http://metaoptimize.com/project- s/wordreprs>, 2 pages. cited by applicant .
Turlan et al., “Word Representations: A Simple and General Method for Semi-Supervised Learning,” Proc. Association for Computational Linguistics, 384-394, 2010. cited by the applicant.

Turney, “Measuring Semantic Similarity by Latent Relational Analysis,” Proc. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 6 pages, 2005. cited by the applicant.

Zweig and Burges, “The Microsoft Research Sentence Completion Challenge,” Microsoft Research Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-129, 7 pages, Feb. 20, 2011. cited by applicant.

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27 thoughts on “Citations behind the Google Brain Word Vectors Approach”

  1. Hi Slava,

    The future of Google, as we have been told by the new CEO Sundar Pichai, that Google is Artificial Intelligence first:

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-bets-on-ai-first-as-computer-vision-voice-recognition-machine-learning-improve/

    The Google Brain team, lead by Jeff Dean is bringing machine learning and tensor flow technology and chips to Google. Leaders such as Geoffrey Hinton are bringing new ideas and technology, and having an idea what this technology looks like and how it works is important to SEOs. When I saw the list of papers cited by the folks who wrote this patent, I knew they had a lot of value and that they were worth reading. It’s good seeing papers submitted by the Google Brain team in support of this patent.

  2. Hello Bill, my name is matthew from indonesia.
    many times im coming here and always learn something new. sorry for my bad english

  3. Hi Bill,

    Thanks for the share. I read a different patent on rank brain several months ago. I was wondering if I read it fromyour website or not? Basically it talked about Rank Brain and Google’s Ranking system and how it can adjust the results of the ranking system based on historial data. Just wondered ifyou posted it out or not? Wanted to have another read of it but lost the link.

  4. Hello Bill,

    Great one over here 🙂

    This is very informative source by your side.

    These are hacks are going to implant in the future. People needs to know about this and they can prepare them self for the
    future.

    Indeed AI is going to be the future no doubt and humans are doing research to implement these as soon as possible.

    Thanks for the share.

    Shantanu.

  5. Hi Luis,

    Thank you for pointing that out. I thought I had caught all of those. I had a problem with my keyboard and ran out to the store to get a new one; but missed fixing the HTML on some links. I’ll adjust those right now. It looks like there was just one of those that I missed. They are all fixed now. Again, thank you.

  6. Hi luis,

    I didn’t expect an article quite like that one, but it was really interesting and made me happy I decided to go through those. 🙂

  7. Hi Shantanu,

    Any time you can come across a list of links to sources that have been put together by a group such as the team behind this patent, I think they are worth looking at. I’m glad I’ve read through a few of them. AI does seem to the the future of search

  8. Hi Tim,

    I did write about a process that seems like it might be related to this one, but which focuses more upon the process of looking at queries, and interpreting them better. I wrote about it on the Go Fish Digital website. The post was:

    Investigating Google RankBrain and Query Term Substitutions
    https://gofishdigital.com/investigating-google-rankbrain-and-query-term-substitutions/

    Curious about how you might feel about the processes in the two different patents working together. Thanks.

  9. Hi Prem,

    I don’t know if this will help us do better SEO; I am hoping that it will help us understand what we are facing when we do SEO though.

  10. Hi David,

    There seem to be a lot of guesses, and I’ve made a few myself. It’s good coming across something that seems to be on target, and the inventors involved are working to help us understand better what they are doing; which is why I thought finding links to those citations was worth pursuing. Really happy to find things like the “Finding structure in Time” article.

  11. Hello Bill,

    Great one over here 🙂

    This is very informative source by your side.

    These are hacks are going to implant in the future. People needs to know about this and they can prepare them self for the
    future.

  12. Ho Bill,
    Thnx for sharing this Amazing article, it’s very helpfull ti understand where se are going with search engine.

  13. Hi Bill,
    learned a lot of information from your article,its really good to find out your blog who are interested to work with SEO domain in future and upcomong years.

  14. Hello Bill,

    another killer….have been reading your blog.

    It will be amazing to see where it is heading…Is AI really future of search…we will find out I guess.

  15. There appear to be a considerable measure of theories, and I’ve made a couple of myself. It’s great going over something that is by all accounts on target, and the designers included are attempting to enable us to see better what they are doing; which is the reason I thought finding connections to those references was worth seeking after.

  16. Thanks for the inside information. This is one thing I like about this blog which relates to the quality and invaluable information relating to SEO constantly published. This blog is my favorite blog in the world

  17. Great Post
    There appear to be a considerable measure of theories, and I’ve made a couple of myself. It’s great going over something that is by all accounts on target, and the designers included are attempting to enable us to see better what they are doing; which is the reason I thought finding connections to those references was worth seeking after.

  18. Hey Bill,
    Honestly I’m so in love with your work. This is tremendous!! As I always say “Everything is Connected”.
    To understand how machine learning algorithm affects SEO, I think these points will be the key points:
    1. Google is trying to replicate human brain.
    2. The only difference is avg human brain can’t remember all of it’s memory but Google brain can.
    3. Who made Google? human!!!
    4. Think like what you would do if you could remember everything like a hard drive?
    5. How would you categories them?
    6. How you priorities them?
    To become successful in Marketing you will have to be that buyer! That means replicating what you would do if you were that buyer.

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