[derEitel]

What happens if you get the latent space of king, do no algebra and return the outcome with king being excluded? In case it's queen, then the author is correct and these examples are highly misleading. In case it's something like prince, Lord or ruler of the seven kingdoms the latent space algebra would be suitable imho.

Also, if we think about it in terms of decision manifolds, it seems the distance between queen and king is too large for the simple - man + woman to have an effect. Why not scale that substraction, so it leads to a change in predicted class without removing king? But of course finding a justifiable weight would be hard..

[philh]

In one model I found online[1], the closest word to "king" was "kings" (0.71) and the second closest was "queen" (0.65).

[1] http://bionlp-www.utu.fi/wv_demo/ (making sure to select the English model)

[derEitel]

If we eliminate king from the result list I would assume it's plural is removed as well. Bummer, that would mean the latent space algebra in this example has no effect whatsoever..

[Majromax]

> If we eliminate king from the result list I would assume it's plural is removed as well.

In fact, the plural isn't removed. You can see the effect by analogizing A:B :: A:?.

For man:king :: man:?, you get [kings, queen, monarch, crown_prince] as the top 4. For man:king :: woman:?, the results are [queen, monarch, princess, crown_prince], with 'kings' as #6.

Of course, your model may vary.

[Erlich_Bachman]

Yes, the result seems entirely predictable and logical to me. Even using normal human logic, even if the amount of meaning that the whole term "king" contains is 100%, the "male" part of that meaning would answer for maybe what, ~20%? The rest would imaginatively be filled with things like "top executive in an organization", "power by family relations, not by democracy", "fancy clothes", "chess piece", "ceremonial post more than actual decision making in some countries", "feudalism", etc.