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Meaning as Vectors

From Words to Whole Sentences

7 min+70 XPStep 1/10

Embedding more than one word

Word vectors are atoms; applications need molecules — whole sentences and documents as single points. The embarrassingly effective baseline: average the word vectors and move on.

Doc2vec (2014) went further — give each paragraph its own pseudo-word that trains alongside the vocabulary, and its learned vector becomes the document's fingerprint. The goal never changes: texts with similar meaning land nearby, whatever words they used.