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loudmax

If anyone else is wondering what the heck "word embedding" means, it's a natural language processing technique.

Here's a nice blog post about it: http://sebastianruder.com/word-embeddings-1/

It can process something like this: king - man + woman = queen

Neat-o.

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Post starts off kind of dense. Finally we get to the section "Word embedding models" and I say "ah ha! here we'll get a concise definition." Cut to ...

Naturally, every feed-forward neural network that takes words from a vocabulary as input and embeds them as vectors into a lower dimensional space, which it then fine-tunes through back-propagation, necessarily yields word embeddings as the weights of the first layer, which is usually referred to as Embedding Layer.

Naturally.

(Thanks, I believe that it is a great blog post, but I might look elsewhere for an intro ... :)

Would love such kind of intro too, especially since I'm working on a product that could greatly benefit from NPL and neural networks.

Could a kind person provide a good reference for something we could learn from?

Or (as I fear), are we past this short time in the beginning of a technic/science (I think about computing, here) when you can learn without going through academic studies?

While dense and not necessarily for the mathematically faint of heart, I've learned a ton about NLP and ANNs through http://cs224d.stanford.edu/.

It's quite an investment of time, but this is a good answer to "do we have to do academic studies to learn this stuff?"

=> Maybe, but nowadays you don't have to quit your job and move close to an university to learn, you can just have online courses.

Thanks :)

This is fairly readable (high-level) post on word embeddings: http://colah.github.io/posts/2014-07-NLP-RNNs-Representation...

And this is one that explains everything OP needs to understand the confusing sentence from their intro:

http://mccormickml.com/2016/04/19/word2vec-tutorial-the-skip...

Thanks :) I feel like some key concepts are a bit beyond my reach, but that they are such a small quantity that it can be a good starting point for googling around. Thank for your help!

Great read, thanks!

I know understand what word vectors are and how they are useful (which, btw, allows me to make way more sense of the output of the program in this HN post :D ), plus more generalities about the field.

Anyone in the same position than me (wanting to learn the basics) should read this.

Excellent blog post. Thanks for the link, I was going to ask about it.

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