Gensim Word2Vec Tutorial: An End-to-End Example

Getting Started with the Gensim Word2Vec Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the Gensim implementation of Word2Vec (in python) and actually get it to work! I‘ve long heard complaints about poor performance, but it really is a combination of two things: (1) your input data and (2) your parameter settings. Check out the Jupyter Notebook if you want direct access to the working example, or read on to get more context.

Side note: The training algorithms in the Gensim package were actually ported from the original Word2Vec implementation by Google and extended with additional functionality.

Imports and logging

First, we start with our imports and get logging established:

# imports needed and logging
import gzip
import gensim 
import logging

logging.basicConfig(format=’%(asctime)s : %(levelname)s : %(message)s’, level=logging.INFO)

Dataset

Next, is finding a really good dataset. The secret to getting Word2Vec really working for you is to have lots and lots of text data in the relevant domain. For example, if your goal is to build a sentiment lexicon, then using a dataset from the medical domain or even wikipedia may not be effective. So, choose your dataset wisely. As Matei Zaharia says,

It’s your data, stupid

That was said in the context of data quality, but it’s not just quality it’s also using the right data for the task.

For this Gensim Word2Vec tutorial, I am going to use data from the OpinRank dataset from some of my Ph.D work. This dataset has full user reviews of cars and hotels. I have specifically concatenated all of the hotel reviews into one big file which is about 97 MB compressed and 229 MB uncompressed. We will use the compressed file for this tutorial. Each line in this file represents a hotel review.

Now, let’s take a closer look at this data below by printing the first line.

with gzip.open (input_file, 'rb') as f:
        for i,line in enumerate (f):
            print(line)
            break

You should see the following:

b"Oct 12 2009 \tNice trendy hotel location not too bad.\tI stayed in this hotel for one night. As this is a fairly new place some of the taxi drivers did not know where it was and/or did not want to drive there. Once I have eventually arrived at the hotel, I was very pleasantly surprised with the decor of the lobby/ground floor area. It was very stylish and modern. I found the reception's staff geeting me with 'Aloha' a bit out of place, but I guess they are briefed to say that to keep up the coroporate image.As I have a Starwood Preferred Guest member, I was given a small gift upon-check in. It was only a couple of fridge magnets in a gift box, but nevertheless a nice gesture.My room was nice and roomy, there are tea and coffee facilities in each room and you get two complimentary bottles of water plus some toiletries by 'bliss'.The location is not great. It is at the last metro stop and you then need to take a taxi, but if you are not planning on going to see the historic sites in Beijing, then you will be ok.I chose to have some breakfast in the hotel, which was really tasty and there was a good selection of dishes. There are a couple of computers to use in the communal area, as well as a pool table. There is also a small swimming pool and a gym area.I would definitely stay in this hotel again, but only if I did not plan to travel to central Beijing, as it can take a long time. The location is ok if you plan to do a lot of shopping, as there is a big shopping centre just few minutes away from the hotel and there are plenty of eating options around, including restaurants that serve a dog meat!\t\r\n"

You can see that this is a pretty good full review with many words and that’s what we want. We have approximately 255,000 such reviews in this dataset.

To avoid confusion, the Gensim’s Word2Vec tutorial says that you need to pass a list of tokenized sentences as the input to Word2Vec. However, you can actually pass in a whole review as a sentence (i.e. a much larger size of text), if you have a lot of data and it should not make much of a difference. In the end, all we are using the dataset for is to get all neighboring words (the context) for a given target word.

Read files into a list

Now that we’ve had a sneak peak of our dataset, we can read it into a list so that we can pass this on to the Word2Vec model. Notice in the code below, that I am directly reading the compressed file. I’m also doing a mild pre-processing of the reviews using gensim.utils.simple_preprocess (line). This does some basic pre-processing such as tokenization, lowercasing, etc. and returns back a list of tokens (words). Documentation of this pre-processing method can be found on the official Gensim documentation site.

def read_input(input_file):
    """This method reads the input file which is in gzip format"""

    logging.info("reading file {0}...this may take a while".format(input_file))
    with gzip.open(input_file, 'rb') as f:
        for i, line in enumerate(f):

            if (i % 10000 == 0):
                logging.info("read {0} reviews".format(i))
            # do some pre-processing and return list of words for each review
            # text
            yield gensim.utils.simple_preprocess(line)

Training the Word2Vec model

Training the model is fairly straightforward. You just instantiate Word2Vec and pass the reviews that we read in the previous step. So, we are essentially passing on a list of lists. Where each list within the main list contains a set of tokens from a user review. Word2Vec uses all these tokens to internally create a vocabulary. And by vocabulary, I mean a set of unique words.

# build vocabulary and train model
    model = gensim.models.Word2Vec(
        documents,
        size=150,
        window=10,
        min_count=2,
        workers=10,
        iter=10)

The step above, builds the vocabulary, and starts training the Word2Vec model. We will get to what these parameters actually mean later in this article. Behind the scenes, what’s happening here is that we are training a neural network with a single hidden layer where we train the model to predict the current word based on the context (using the default neural architecture). However, we are not going to use the neural network after training! Instead, the goal is to learn the weights of the hidden layer. These weights are essentially the word vectors that we’re trying to learn. The resulting learned vector is also known as the embeddings. You can think of these embeddings as some features that describe the target word. For example, the word `king` may be described by the gender, age, the type of people the king associates with, etc.

This article talks about the different neural network architectures you can use to train a Word2Vec model.

Training on the Word2Vec OpinRank dataset takes several minutes so sip a cup of tea, and wait patiently.

Some results!