  Although the word-popularity based negative sampler has shown superb
performance in the skip-gram model, the theoretical motivation behind
oversampling popular (non-observed) words as negative samples is still not well
understood. In this paper, we start from an investigation of the gradient
vanishing issue in the skipgram model without a proper negative sampler. By
performing an insightful analysis from the stochastic gradient descent (SGD)
learning perspective, we demonstrate that, both theoretically and intuitively,
negative samples with larger inner product scores are more informative than
those with lower scores for the SGD learner in terms of both convergence rate
and accuracy. Understanding this, we propose an alternative sampling algorithm
that dynamically selects informative negative samples during each SGD update.
More importantly, the proposed sampler accounts for multi-dimensional
self-embedded features during the sampling process, which essentially makes it
more effective than the original popularity-based (one-dimensional) sampler.
Empirical experiments further verify our observations, and show that our
fine-grained samplers gain significant improvement over the existing ones
without increasing computational complexity.
