Demystifying Word2Vec – A Hands-on Tutorial

Abhay Kashyap

10:30am Monday, 19 October 2015 **ITE 456**

In the world of NLP, Word2Vec is one of the coolest kids in town! But what exactly is it and how does it work? More importantly, how is it used/useful?

For the first 10-15 minutes, we will go over distributional an distributed representation of words and the neural language model behind Word2Vec. We will also briefly look at doc2vec, the extension of Word2Vec for longer pieces of text.

For the remainder of the time (45-60 minutes), we will get our feet wet by running Word2Vec on a dataset which will then be followed by discussions about potential ways it can be useful for your own work.

What to bring – Any computing machine with Python installed, lots of curiosity and some delicious snacks for me maybe? We will use the excellent gensim package for python to run Word2Vec along with cython to speed things up. If you aren’t familiar with Python or don’t like it, no worries! It’s really just 5-6 lines of code! The training dataset will be provided. If you wish to bring your own, that’s cool too.

NOTE: We will hold this week’s Ebiquity meeting in ITE 456.