Referring back to 
To determine a word representation of a given word in the sentence 402, the neighbor determination module 522 is configured to identify from the sentence graph 512 a set of neighbor nodes 524 having edges connected with a given node representing the given word. The set of the neighbor nodes 524 for the i-th node may be represented as i. Here, a “neighbor node” is syntactically related to the given node in a syntactic structure of the sentence 402, but may not be necessarily located adjacent to the given node within the sentence.
In some embodiments, the set of neighbor nodes 524 for the given node includes those that have edges directly connected with the given node, which may also be referred to as the one-hop neighbor nodes (or one-hop neighbors for short). In a specific embodiment of the directed sentence graph 512, the set of neighbor nodes 524 includes nodes that have edges directed to the given node.