Embeddings: Interactive exercises

The following widget, based on TensorFlow's Embedding Projector, flattens 10,000 word2vec static vectors into a 3D space. This collapse of dimensions can be misleading, because the points closest to each other in the original high-dimensional space may appear farther apart in the 3D projection. The closest n points are highlighted in purple, with n chosen by the user in Isolate __ points. The sidebar on the right identifies those nearest neighbors.

In these experiments, you'll play with the word2vec embeddings in the widget above.

Task 1

Try to find the 20 nearest neighbors for the following, and see where the groups fall in the cloud.

  • iii, third, and three
  • tao and way
  • orange, yellow, and juice

What do you notice about these results?

Click here for our answer

Even though iii, third, and three are semantically similar, they appear in different contexts in text and don't appear to be close together in this embedding space. In word2vec, iii is closer to iv than to third.

Similarly, while way is a direct translation of tao, these words most frequently occur with completely different groups of words in the dataset used, and so the two vectors are very far apart.

The first several nearest neighbors of orange are colors, but juice and peel, related to the meaning of orange as fruit, show up as the 14th and 18th nearest neighbors. prince, meanwhile, as in the Prince of Orange, is 17th. In the projection, the words closest to orange are yellow and other colors, while the closest words to juice don't include orange.

Task 2

Try to figure out some characteristics of the training data. For example, try to find the 100 nearest neighbors for the following, and see where the groups are in the cloud:

  • boston, paris, tokyo, delhi, moscow, and seoul (this is a trick question)
  • jane, sarah, john, peter, rosa, and juan

Click here for our answer

Many of the nearest neighbors to boston are other cities in the US. Many of the nearest neighbors to paris are other cities in Europe. tokyo and delhi don't seem to have similar results: one is associated with cities around the world that are travel hubs, while the other is associated with india and related words. seoul doesn't appear in this trimmed-down set of word vectors at all.

It seems that this dataset contains many documents related to US national geography, some documents relate to European regional geography, and not much fine-grained coverage of other countries or regions.

Similarly, this dataset seems to contain many male English names, some female English names, and far fewer names from other languages. Note that Don Rosa wrote and illustrated Scrooge McDuck comics for Disney, which is the likely reason that `scrooge` and `mcduck` are among the nearest neighbors for `rosa`.

The pre-trained word vectors offered by word2vec were in fact trained on Google News articles up to 2013.

Task 3

Embeddings aren't limited to words. Images, audio, and other data can also be embedded. For this task:

  1. Open TensorFlow's Embedding Projector.
  2. In the left sidebar titled Data, choose Mnist with images. This brings up a projection of the embeddings of the MNIST database of handwritten digits.
  3. Click to stop the rotation and choose a single image. Zoom in and out as needed.
  4. Look in the right sidebar for nearest neighbors. Are there any surprises?
  • Why do some 7s have 1s as their nearest neighbor? Why do some 8s have 9 as their nearest neighbor?
  • Is there anything about the images on the edges of the projection space that seem different from the images in the center of the projection space?

Keep in mind that the model that created these embeddings is receiving image data, which is to say, pixels, and choosing a numerical vector representation for each image. The model doesn't make an automatic mental association between the image of the handwritten digit and the numerical digit itself.

Click here for our answer

Due to similarities in shape, the vector representations of some of the skinnier, narrower 7s are placed closer to the vectors for handwritten 1s. The same thing happens for some 8s and 9s, and even some of the 5s and 3s.

The handwritten digits on the outside of the projection space appear more strongly definable as one of the nine digits and strongly differentiated from other possible digits.

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Embedding space and static embeddings (5 min)
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Obtaining embeddings (15 min)