Comparing skip-gram with CBOW
Before looking at the performance differences and investigating reasons, let's remind ourselves about the fundamental difference between the skip-gram and CBOW methods.
As shown in the following figures, given a context and a target word, skip-gram observes only the target word and a single word of the context in a single input/output tuple. However, CBOW observes the target word and all the words in the context in a single sample. For example, if we assume the phrase dog barked at the mailman, skip-gram sees an input-output tuple such as ["dog", "at"] at a single time step, whereas CBOW sees an input-output tuple [["dog","barked","the","mailman"], "at"]. Therefore, in a given batch of data, CBOW receives more information than skip-gram about the context of a given word. Let's next see how this difference affects the performance of the two algorithms.
As shown in the preceding figures...
