Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@aparrish
Last active November 9, 2024 12:16
Show Gist options
  • Save aparrish/2f562e3737544cf29aaf1af30362f469 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save aparrish/2f562e3737544cf29aaf1af30362f469 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Understanding word vectors: A tutorial for "Reading and Writing Electronic Text," a class I teach at ITP. (Python 2.7) Code examples released under CC0 https://creativecommons.org/choose/zero/, other text released under CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Display the source blob
Display the rendered blob
Raw
Loading
Sorry, something went wrong. Reload?
Sorry, we cannot display this file.
Sorry, this file is invalid so it cannot be displayed.
@imkhubaibraza
Copy link

Great explanation, Thank you for sharing

@john77eipe
Copy link

The whole code has been updated for the latest versions of python and spacy.

Available here as a notebook: https://www.kaggle.com/john77eipe/understanding-word-vectors

@DouglasLapsley
Copy link

Fantastic article thank you. How could I scale this to compare a single sentence with around a million other sentences to find the most similar ones though? I’m thinking that iteration wouldn’t be an option? Thanks!

@zetadaro
Copy link

Fantastic article thank you. How could I scale this to compare a single sentence with around a million other sentences to find the most similar ones though? I’m thinking that iteration wouldn’t be an option? Thanks!

I have the same problem and I was thinking about the non performance of iterate over so many sentences. If you get something interesting related to this it will be great to share it, I will do the same.

@DouglasLapsley
Copy link

Fantastic article thank you. How could I scale this to compare a single sentence with around a million other sentences to find the most similar ones though? I’m thinking that iteration wouldn’t be an option? Thanks!

I have the same problem and I was thinking about the non performance of iterate over so many sentences. If you get something interesting related to this it will be great to share it, I will do the same.

Will do. I've looked at a number of text similarity approaches and they all seem to either rely on iteration or semantic word graphs with a pre-calculated one to one similarity relationship between all the nodes which means 1M nodes = 1M x 1M relationships which is also clearly untennable and very slow to process. I'm sure I must be missing something obvious, but I'm not sure what!

The only thing I can think of at the moment is pre-processing the similarity by saving the vectors for each sentence against their database record, then iterating for each sentence against each other sentence in the way described in this article (or any other similarity distance function), and then saving a one to one graph similarity relationship only for items that are highly similar (to reduce the number of similarity relationships created only to relevent ones). i.e. don't do the iteration at run-time, but rather do the iteration once and save the resulting similarities where of high similarity in node relationships which would be quick to query at runtime.

I'd welcome any guidance from others on this though! Has anyone tried this approach?

@DouglasLapsley
Copy link

Fantastic article thank you. How could I scale this to compare a single sentence with around a million other sentences to find the most similar ones though? I’m thinking that iteration wouldn’t be an option? Thanks!

I have the same problem and I was thinking about the non performance of iterate over so many sentences. If you get something interesting related to this it will be great to share it, I will do the same.

It looks like a pre-trained approximate nearest neighbour approach may be a good option where you have large numbers of vectors. I've not yet tried this, but here is the logic https://erikbern.com/2015/09/24/nearest-neighbor-methods-vector-models-part-1.html and here is an implementation https://medium.com/@kevin_yang/simple-approximate-nearest-neighbors-in-python-with-annoy-and-lmdb-e8a701baf905

Using the Annoy library, essentially the approach here is to create an lmdb map and an Annoy index with the word embeddings. Then save those to disk. At runtime, load these, vectorise your query text and use Annoy to look up n nearest neighbours and return their IDs.

Anyone have experience of this with sentences rather than just words?

@juhanishen
Copy link

Awesome good!

@juliansteam
Copy link

Vey intuitive tutorial. Thank you!

@erkekin
Copy link

erkekin commented Aug 25, 2020

Not sure why I'm getting the following error, working on macOS with Jupyter Lab, Python 2.7 and Spacy 2.0.9:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-2-090b6e832a74> in <module>()
      3 # It creates a list of unique words in the text
      4 tokens = list(set([w.text for w in doc if w.is_alpha]))
----> 5 print nlp.vocab['cheese'].vector

lexeme.pyx in spacy.lexeme.Lexeme.vector.__get__()

ValueError: Word vectors set to length 0. This may be because you don't have a model installed or loaded, or because your model doesn't include word vectors. For more info, see the documentation: 
https://spacy.io/usage/models

replace nlp.vocab['cheese'].vector with nlp('cheese').vector
and

def vec(s):
    return nlp.vocab[s].vector

with

def vec(s):
    return nlp(s).vector

@motahher
Copy link

very good explanation

@JenPink25
Copy link

Enjoyed reading this. Thank you!

@lewiuberg
Copy link

One of the best tutorials on word to vec. Nevertheless there is a "quantum-leap" in the explanation when it comes to "Word vectors in spaCy". Suddenly we have vectors associated to any word, of a predetermined dimension. Why? Where are those vectors coming from? how are they calculated? Based on which texts? Since wordtovec takes into account context the vector representations are going to be very different in technical papers, in literature, poetry, facebook posts etc. How do you create your own vectors related to a particular collection of concepts over a particular set of documents? I observed this problematic in many many word2vec tutorials. The explanation starts very smoothly, basic, very well explained up to details; and suddenly there is a big hole in the explanation. In any case this is one of the best explanations I have found on wordtovec theory. thanks

I agree! I thought I had deleted many cells and downloaded it again looking for the gap.

@jdmedenilla
Copy link

jdmedenilla commented Feb 12, 2021

When I ran snippets of code that access a library, it gave me errors like this: "FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'pg345.txt'". And same thing with the color file: "FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'xkcd.json'"
I ran those on jupyter notebook. Do you know what's wrong?

Note: I tried doing it in Visual Code but it gave me the same problem, even after saving it in the same directory. Also i've read online to use the absolute path, but it still would not work.

@Zaravanon
Copy link

Great, Thank You!

@tugcekizilltepe
Copy link

Great, well-explained tutorial, thank you!

@prakashr7d
Copy link

Not sure why I'm getting the following error, working on macOS with Jupyter Lab, Python 2.7 and Spacy 2.0.9:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-2-090b6e832a74> in <module>()
      3 # It creates a list of unique words in the text
      4 tokens = list(set([w.text for w in doc if w.is_alpha]))
----> 5 print nlp.vocab['cheese'].vector

lexeme.pyx in spacy.lexeme.Lexeme.vector.__get__()

ValueError: Word vectors set to length 0. This may be because you don't have a model installed or loaded, or because your model doesn't include word vectors. For more info, see the documentation: 
https://spacy.io/usage/models

You want to download 'en_core_web_lg' model

@saiankit
Copy link

OMG !! Really had a great time reading this beautiful gist. Very well explained.

@DavidHarar
Copy link

Thanks!

@mikeolubode
Copy link

I was led here by a tutorial on word vectors from youtube. Thanks for the simplicity!

@yishairasowsky
Copy link

very good

@robertocsa
Copy link

Thank you for sharing this. Excelent job!

@avneesh91
Copy link

this is amazing, thank you for explanation!!

@prateekcaire
Copy link

Thanks!!

@adebiasi
Copy link

Very nice tutorial!

One question:
A word near the origin (0,0,0 ...) in the n-space has less possibility to be the result of an addition among words. As opposite, a word very distant of the origin could be the result of many possible additions among many words. Does this mean that complex concepts are far for the origin and basic concepts are near?

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment