Unsupervisedly learned word vectors have proven to provide exceptionally effective features in many NLP tasks. Most common intrinsic evaluations of vector quality measure correlation with similarity judgments. However, these often correlate poorly with how well the learned representations perform as features in downstream evaluation tasks. We present QVEC—a computationally inexpensive intrinsic evaluation measure of the quality of word embeddings based on alignment to a matrix of features extracted from manually crafted lexical resources—that obtains strong correlation with performance of the vectors in a battery of downstream semantic evaluation tasks.1
