//- 💫 DOCS > USAGE > VECTORS & SIMILARITY > BASICS +aside("Training word vectors") | Dense, real valued vectors representing distributional similarity | information are now a cornerstone of practical NLP. The most common way | to train these vectors is the #[+a("https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec") word2vec] | family of algorithms. If you need to train a word2vec model, we recommend | the implementation in the Python library | #[+a("https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/") Gensim]. include ../_spacy-101/_similarity include ../_spacy-101/_word-vectors +h(3, "in-context") Similarities in context p | Aside from spaCy's built-in word vectors, which were trained on a lot of | text with a wide vocabulary, the parsing, tagging and NER models also | rely on vector representations of the #[strong meanings of words in context]. | As the #[+a("/usage/processing-pipelines") processing pipeline] is | applied spaCy encodes a document's internal meaning representations as an | array of floats, also called a tensor. This allows spaCy to make a | reasonable guess at a word's meaning, based on its surrounding words. | Even if a word hasn't been seen before, spaCy will know #[em something] | about it. Because spaCy uses a 4-layer convolutional network, the | tensors are sensitive to up to #[strong four words on either side] of a | word. p | For example, here are three sentences containing the out-of-vocabulary | word "labrador" in different contexts. +code. doc1 = nlp(u"The labrador barked.") doc2 = nlp(u"The labrador swam.") doc3 = nlp(u"the labrador people live in canada.") for doc in [doc1, doc2, doc3]: labrador = doc[1] dog = nlp(u"dog") print(labrador.similarity(dog)) p | Even though the model has never seen the word "labrador", it can make a | fairly accurate prediction of its similarity to "dog" in different | contexts. +table(["Context", "labrador.similarity(dog)"]) +row +cell The #[strong labrador] barked. +cell #[code 0.56] #[+procon("yes", "similar")] +row +cell The #[strong labrador] swam. +cell #[code 0.48] #[+procon("no", "dissimilar")] +row +cell the #[strong labrador] people live in canada. +cell #[code 0.39] #[+procon("no", "dissimilar")] p | The same also works for whole documents. Here, the variance of the | similarities is lower, as all words and their order are taken into | account. However, the context-specific similarity is often still | reflected pretty accurately. +code. doc1 = nlp(u"Paris is the largest city in France.") doc2 = nlp(u"Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania.") doc3 = nlp(u"An emu is a large bird.") for doc in [doc1, doc2, doc3]: for other_doc in [doc1, doc2, doc3]: print(doc.similarity(other_doc)) p | Even though the sentences about Paris and Vilnius consist of different | words and entities, they both describe the same concept and are seen as | more similar than the sentence about emus. In this case, even a misspelled | version of "Vilnius" would still produce very similar results. +table - var examples = {"Paris is the largest city in France.": [1, 0.85, 0.65], "Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania.": [0.85, 1, 0.55], "An emu is a large bird.": [0.65, 0.55, 1]} - var counter = 0 +row +row +cell for _, label in examples +cell=label each cells, label in examples +row(counter ? null : "divider") +cell=label for cell in cells +cell.u-text-center - var result = cell < 0.7 ? ["no", "dissimilar"] : cell != 1 ? ["yes", "similar"] : ["neutral", "identical"] | #[code=cell.toFixed(2)] #[+procon(...result)] - counter++ p | Sentences that consist of the same words in different order will likely | be seen as very similar – but never identical. +code. docs = [nlp(u"dog bites man"), nlp(u"man bites dog"), nlp(u"man dog bites"), nlp(u"dog man bites")] for doc in docs: for other_doc in docs: print(doc.similarity(other_doc)) p | Interestingly, "man bites dog" and "man dog bites" are seen as slightly | more similar than "man bites dog" and "dog bites man". This may be a | conincidence – or the result of "man" being interpreted as both sentence's | subject. +table - var examples = {"dog bites man": [1, 0.9, 0.89, 0.92], "man bites dog": [0.9, 1, 0.93, 0.9], "man dog bites": [0.89, 0.93, 1, 0.92], "dog man bites": [0.92, 0.9, 0.92, 1]} - var counter = 0 +row("head") +cell for _, label in examples +cell.u-text-center=label each cells, label in examples +row(counter ? null : "divider") +cell=label for cell in cells +cell.u-text-center - var result = cell < 0.7 ? ["no", "dissimilar"] : cell != 1 ? ["yes", "similar"] : ["neutral", "identical"] | #[code=cell.toFixed(2)] #[+procon(...result)] - counter++