[manuka]

Who thinks here that:

"King – (Man + Woman)"

and

"(King – Man) + Woman"

Must have different outcome? I do. No wonder Word2Vec sucks! Words are not elements of vector space :)

[pure-awesome]

Subtraction is not associative. One cannot just move parentheses around like that with numbers either:

5 - (2 + 3) =/= (5 - 2) + 3

The same holds for elements of a vector space.

[raverbashing]

You are correct

I was about to say you were wrong, but you are correct, and it is a bit unintuitive why - https://www.quora.com/Is-vector-subtraction-associative

[EForEndeavour]

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but what's so unintuitive about subtraction (vector or scalar) not being associative? Counterexamples seem easy to find. For example, 1 - 1 - 1 is not the same as 1 - (1 - 1).

[bennofs]

King - (Man + Woman) is the same as King - Man - Woman which is not the same as your second example at all.

[toxik]

The idea is that king k and queen q are both near some location r with a small displacement so k = r + dk and likewise q = r + dq. Then also so around s for man m and woman w, so m = s + dm and w = s + dw. The idea then is that dk = dm and dq = dw, this is the ”semantic structure.” The displacement is the same. So k - m + w = r + dk - dm + dw = q. It would have been cool, but it seems what really happens is queen gets embedded close to king, and the nearest word is just queen. I guess it does show that dk = dm and dq = dw though, but it could also be that dk = dq, and dm = dw.