Summary of A Complete Overview of Word Embeddings

Summary of "A Complete Overview of Word Embeddings"

This video provides a comprehensive explanation of word embeddings, their purpose, creation methods, and practical usage in natural language processing (NLP).


Main Ideas and Concepts

  1. Why Word Embeddings Are Needed
    • Machine learning models cannot work directly with raw text; they require numerical input.
    • Text must be converted into numerical representations.
    • Traditional methods include:
      • One-hot encoding: Creates a sparse, high-dimensional vector with mostly zeros.
      • Count-based approaches: Summarize sentences into vectors by counting word occurrences.
        • Examples: Bag of Words, n-grams, TF-IDF.
    • These traditional methods have limitations:
      • They do not capture word context.
      • Cannot handle unseen words.
      • Result in sparse, inefficient vectors.
  2. What Are Word Embeddings?
    • Word embeddings represent words as dense, low-dimensional vectors.
    • Similar words (used in similar contexts) have vectors close to each other in the embedding space.
    • Embedding space is a multi-dimensional vector space where distances reflect semantic similarity.
    • Example: Vectors for "tea" and "coffee" are closer than "tea" and "pea" despite spelling similarities.
    • Embeddings enable meaningful vector operations (e.g., king - man + woman ≈ queen).
  3. How Word Embeddings Are Created
    • Word embeddings are learned from large text corpora.
    • Approaches include:
      • Embedding layer in neural networks: Initialized randomly and trained alongside the main model.
        • Advantage: Custom and task-specific embeddings.
        • Disadvantage: Requires large data and long training.
      • Pre-trained embedding models: Trained on large datasets and can be reused.
    • Popular embedding algorithms:
      • Word2Vec: Uses context to predict words.
        • Two methods:
          • Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW): Predict middle word from surrounding words.
          • Skip-gram: Predict surrounding words from the middle word.
        • Single hidden layer neural network; embedding size = number of neurons.
      • GloVe (Global Vectors): Combines local context (like Word2Vec) with global co-occurrence statistics.
        • Objective: Dot product of word vectors approximates log of word co-occurrence probabilities.
      • FastText: Extends Word2Vec by representing words as subword (character n-grams) units.
        • Handles rare and unseen words better.
        • Works well with morphologically rich languages.
      • ELMo (Embeddings from Language Models):
        • Contextual embeddings: word vectors depend on entire sentence context.
        • Uses bi-directional LSTM trained on language modeling tasks.
        • Can differentiate homonyms and handle misspellings.
        • More complex and requires dedicated explanation.
  4. Using Word Embeddings in Projects
    • Two main options:
      • Train your own embeddings: Custom to your data but resource-intensive.
      • Use pre-trained embeddings: Saves time, not always domain-specific.
    • Pre-trained embeddings can be used:
      • Statically (fixed during training).
      • Fine-tuned (updated during training).
    • Libraries like Gensim provide easy access to pre-trained embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText).
    • Practical exploration:
      • Checking closest words to a query word.
      • Measuring similarity between words.
      • Performing analogy tasks (e.g., king - man + woman = queen).
      • Example analogy with restaurant - dinner + cocktail = bar (varies by model).
    • Word embeddings are typically used as part of larger NLP models for tasks like sentiment analysis.

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