Word embedding

In natural language processing (NLP), 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.^[1] 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,^[2] dimensionality reduction on the word co-occurrence matrix,^[3][4][5] probabilistic models,^[6] explainable knowledge base method,^[7] and explicit representation in terms of the context in which words appear.^[8]

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^[9] and sentiment analysis.^[10]