[slashcom]

For the record, good old fashioned bag of words representations (tf-idf, LDA, LSA) still provide useful representations for documents. Obviously we hope to do better, but recently people act like there's no way of turning a document into a vector.

[nl]

Bag of word representations work fine for some applications.

The reason people want better representations is for the applications where they don’t. For example, Bag of words doesn’t capture agreement or disagree well, whereas better representations can.