  Word embeddings improve generalization over lexical features by placing each
word in a lower-dimensional space, using distributional information obtained
from unlabeled data. However, the effectiveness of word embeddings for
downstream NLP tasks is limited by out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, for which
embeddings do not exist. In this paper, we present MIMICK, an approach to
generating OOV word embeddings compositionally, by learning a function from
spellings to distributional embeddings. Unlike prior work, MIMICK does not
require re-training on the original word embedding corpus; instead, learning is
performed at the type level. Intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations demonstrate
the power of this simple approach. On 23 languages, MIMICK improves performance
over a word-based baseline for tagging part-of-speech and morphosyntactic
attributes. It is competitive with (and complementary to) a supervised
character-based model in low-resource settings.
