Enhancing Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) Representations via Attention-Based Pooling for Text Classification

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sakour, Ali, Sakour, Zoalfekar
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sakour, Ali
Sakour, Zoalfekar
author_facet Sakour, Ali
Sakour, Zoalfekar
contents The Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model relies on global word co-occurrence matrices to construct distributional semantic representations. While these representations capture lexical relationships effectively, aggregating them into sentence-level embeddings via standard mean pooling often results in information loss. Mean pooling assigns equal weight to all tokens, thereby diluting the impact of contextually salient words with uninformative structural tokens. In this paper, we address this limitation by integrating a learnable, temperature-scaled additive attention mechanism into the HAL representation pipeline. To mitigate the sparsity and high dimensionality of the raw co-occurrence matrices, we apply Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to project the vectors into a dense latent space prior to the attention layer. We evaluate the proposed architecture on the IMDB sentiment analysis dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that the attention-based pooling approach achieves a test accuracy of 82.38%, yielding an absolute improvement of 6.74 percentage points over the traditional mean pooling baseline (75.64%). Furthermore, qualitative analysis of the attention weights indicates that the mechanism successfully suppresses stop-words and selectively attends to sentiment-bearing tokens, improving both classification performance and model interpretability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_20149
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) Representations via Attention-Based Pooling for Text Classification
Sakour, Ali
Sakour, Zoalfekar
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model relies on global word co-occurrence matrices to construct distributional semantic representations. While these representations capture lexical relationships effectively, aggregating them into sentence-level embeddings via standard mean pooling often results in information loss. Mean pooling assigns equal weight to all tokens, thereby diluting the impact of contextually salient words with uninformative structural tokens. In this paper, we address this limitation by integrating a learnable, temperature-scaled additive attention mechanism into the HAL representation pipeline. To mitigate the sparsity and high dimensionality of the raw co-occurrence matrices, we apply Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to project the vectors into a dense latent space prior to the attention layer. We evaluate the proposed architecture on the IMDB sentiment analysis dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that the attention-based pooling approach achieves a test accuracy of 82.38%, yielding an absolute improvement of 6.74 percentage points over the traditional mean pooling baseline (75.64%). Furthermore, qualitative analysis of the attention weights indicates that the mechanism successfully suppresses stop-words and selectively attends to sentiment-bearing tokens, improving both classification performance and model interpretability.
title Enhancing Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) Representations via Attention-Based Pooling for Text Classification
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20149