Are All Good Word Vector Spaces Isomorphic?

Understand

Existing algorithms for aligning cross-lingual word vector spaces assume that vector spaces are approximately isomorphic.

• As a result, they perform poorly or fail completely on non-isomorphic spaces.
• Such non-isomorphism has been hypothesised to result from typological differences between languages.
• In this work, we ask whether non-isomorphism is also crucially a sign of degenerate word vector spaces.