Binary Paragraph Vectors
Table 3: Information retrieval results for the Binary PV-DBOW model trained on an unrelated text corpus. Results are reported for 128-bit codes.
['[EMPTY]', 'MAP', 'NDCG@10']
In the experiments presented thus far we had at our disposal training sets with documents similar to the documents for which we inferred binary codes. One could ask a question, if it is possible to use binary paragraph vectors without collecting a domain-specific training set? For example, what if we needed to hash documents that are not associated with any available domain-specific corpus? One solution could be to train the model with a big generic text corpus, that covers a wide variety of domains. It is not obvious, however, whether short binary codes would also perform well in similar settings. To shed light on this question we trained Binary PV-DBOW with bigrams on the English Wikipedia, and then inferred binary codes for the test parts of the 20 Newsgroups and RCV1 datasets. The model trained on an unrelated text corpus gives lower retrieval precision than models with domain-specific training sets, which is not surprising. However, it still performs remarkably well, indicating that the semantics it captured can be useful for different text collections. Importantly, these results were obtained without domain-specific finetuning.