Stop 10 · NLP & Modern AITopics · 3/7

Word Embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe)

In short

In bag of words, 'tasty' and 'delicious' are as unrelated as 'tasty' and 'tractor'. Embeddings fix that by giving each word a list of numbers where similar words sit close together.

Representing words as dense numeric vectors that capture semantic meaning — words with similar meanings end up close together in vector space, a major step up from Bag of Words' sparse counts.

The mascot arranges glass spice jars on a long shelf, with similar colours grouped together.

Think of it like this

The well-organised spice shelf

A good cook arranges spices so similar ones sit together: chilli powders in one corner, green herbs in another, warm garam masala spices in the middle. You can find a substitute just by looking next door. Embeddings place words on a shelf like that, in hundreds of dimensions.

Watch it happen

How Word2Vec learns its vectors

Corpus

Window

Predict

Nudge

Neighbours

1/5Start with lots of sentences and give every word a random vector, say 100 numbers.

The big ideas

What you need to know

Similarity is distance

Cosine similarity between two vectors measures how alike two words are used.

Vector arithmetic

The famous example: king minus man plus woman lands near queen. It works for some relations, not all.

GloVe is pretrained

GloVe vectors were trained on large public text corpora. You can download and use them directly.

One vector per word

'Bank' gets one vector for river bank and money bank. Transformers later fixed this with context-aware vectors.

See it in code

Walk through the code

python

1from gensim.models import Word2Vec2 3sentences = [4    ["chai", "with", "ginger", "and", "sugar"],5    ["coffee", "with", "milk", "and", "sugar"],6    ["chai", "with", "milk", "and", "cardamom"],7    ["coffee", "with", "ginger", "and", "milk"],8]9model = Word2Vec(sentences, vector_size=20, window=2, min_count=1, epochs=200, seed=1)10 11print(model.wv["chai"][:5])                 # first 5 of 20 numbers12print(model.wv.most_similar("chai", topn=2))

1/3Each sentence is already a list of tokens.

A toy corpus, so results are noisy. Real embeddings train on millions of sentences. Install with pip install gensim.

Save yourself the pain

Common mistakes

Oops

Training Word2Vec on a few hundred sentences and trusting the neighbours.

Do this instead

Use pretrained vectors such as GloVe for small datasets. Training your own needs a large corpus.

Oops

Expecting one embedding to separate every meaning of a word.

Do this instead

Static embeddings mix senses. Use a transformer model when context changes the meaning.

Your mission

Explore pretrained GloVe

~25 min

Quick check

Why do 'tasty' and 'delicious' end up with similar Word2Vec vectors?

Go deeper

1Load pretrained word embeddings and explore nearest-neighbor words for a few examples.
2Try the classic 'king - man + woman ≈ queen' vector arithmetic example.
3Learn why embeddings capture semantic relationships that raw word counts can't.