In natural language processing, a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers. Methods to generate this mapping include neural networks, dimensionality reduction on the word co-occurrence matrix, probabilistic models, explainable knowledge base method, and explicit representation in terms of the context in which words appear. Word and phrase embeddings, when used as the underlying input representation, have been shown to boost the performance in NLP tasks such as syntactic parsing and sentiment analysis.
Development and history of the approach In distributional semantics, a quantitative methodological approach for understanding meaning in observed language, word embeddings or semantic feature space models have been used as a knowledge representation for some time. Such models aim to quantify and categorize semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. The underlying idea that "a word is characterized by the company it keeps" was proposed in a 1957 article by John Rupert Firth, but also has roots in the contemporaneous work on search systems and in cognitive psychology. The notion of a semantic space with lexical items (words or multi-word terms) represented as vectors or embeddings is based on the computational challenges of capturing distributional characteristics and using them for practical application to measure similarity between words, phrases, or entire documents. The first generation of semantic space models is the vector space model for information retrieval. Such vector space models for words and their distributional data implemented in their simplest form results in a very sparse vector space of high dimensionality (cf. curse of dimensionality). Reducing the number of dimensions using linear algebraic methods such as singular value decomposition then led to the introduction of latent semantic analysis in the late 1980s and the random indexing approach for collecting word co-occurrence contexts. In 2000, Bengio et al. provided in a series of papers titled "Neural probabilistic language models" to reduce the high dimensionality of word representations in contexts by "learning a distributed representation for words". A study published in NeurIPS (NIPS) 2002 introduced the use of both word and document embeddings applying the method of kernel CCA to bilingual (and multi-lingual) corpora, also providing an early example of self-supervised learning of word embeddings. Word embeddings come in two different styles, one in which words are expressed as vectors of co-occurring words, and another in which words are expressed as vectors of linguistic contexts in which the words occur; these different styles are studied in Lavelli et al., 2004. Roweis and Saul published in Science how to use "locally linear embedding" (LLE) to discover representations of high dimensional data structures. Most new word embedding techniques after about 2005 rely on a neural network architecture instead of more probabilistic and algebraic models, after foundational work done by Yoshua Bengio and colleagues. The approach has been adopted by many research groups after theoretical advances in 2010 had been made on the quality of vectors and the training speed of the model, as well as after hardware advances allowed for a broader parameter space to be explored profitably. In 2013, a team at Google led by Tomas Mikolov created word2vec, a word embedding toolkit that can train vector space models faster than previous approaches. The word2vec approach has been widely used in experimentation and was instrumental in raising interest for word embeddings as a technology, moving the research strand out of specialised research into broader experimentation and eventually paving the way for practical application. Later work on word embeddings included fastText, which represented words partly through character n-grams rather than treating each word as a single indivisible unit.
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