English

Word2Bits - Quantized Word Vectors

Computation and Language 2018-04-03 v3

Abstract

Word vectors require significant amounts of memory and storage, posing issues to resource limited devices like mobile phones and GPUs. We show that high quality quantized word vectors using 1-2 bits per parameter can be learned by introducing a quantization function into Word2Vec. We furthermore show that training with the quantization function acts as a regularizer. We train word vectors on English Wikipedia (2017) and evaluate them on standard word similarity and analogy tasks and on question answering (SQuAD). Our quantized word vectors not only take 8-16x less space than full precision (32 bit) word vectors but also outperform them on word similarity tasks and question answering.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.05651,
  title  = {Word2Bits - Quantized Word Vectors},
  author = {Maximilian Lam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.05651},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:53:55.645Z