To Örebro University

This paper presents an approach for substantial reduction of the training and operating phases of Self-Organizing Maps in tasks of 2-D projection of multi-dimensional symbolic data for natural language processing such as language classification, topic extraction, and ontology development. The conventional approach for this type of problem is to use n-gram statistics as a fixed size representation for input of Self-Organizing Maps. The performance bottleneck with n-gram statistics is that the size of representation and as a result the computation time of Self-Organizing Maps grows exponentially with the size of n-grams. The presented approach is based on distributed representations of structured data using principles of hyperdimensional computing. The experiments performed on the European languages recognition task demonstrate that Self-Organizing Maps trained with distributed representations require less computations than the conventional n-gram statistics while well preserving the overall performance of Self-Organizing Maps.