Imagine weâre trying to teach a child what a âdogâ isânot by showing them a photo, but by describing it: âIt has four legs, likes bones, chases catsâŠâ We start building connections around that word. Now, if we do the same for âcatâââfour legs, loves milk, climbs treesââsome descriptions overlap. This overlap means theyâre related in some way.
đ Thatâs exactly what vector embeddings do. They take words like âdogâ and âcatâ and turn them into numbersâcoordinates on a big imaginary graph. Words with similar meanings land closer together. Think of it like placing pins on a giant board based on how they relate.
đșïž Putting Words on the Map
Letâs say we add other words: âIndia,â âTaj Mahal,â âFrance,â âEiffel Tower.â Again, the system learns relationshipsâIndia and France are countries; the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower are famous monuments.
đȘ So if you plot these as dots, âIndiaâ would be close to âTaj Mahalâ just like âFranceâ would be near âEiffel Tower.â Theyâre not just wordsâtheyâre connections, memories, associations.
đ§” The Magic Thread: Context
Now suppose someone says âbank.â Do they mean the place where money is stored, or the side of a river? Here's where embedding shines. The system reads the contextâwhat words came before or afterâand shifts the meaning accordingly.
đĄ It's like mom knowing the difference between "Bank mein paise daale" and "Nadi ke kinaare baith gaye."
đȘ Why It Matters
Because of embeddings, computers can âunderstandâ words like humans doânot just as spellings, but as ideas. Thatâs how your phone autocompletes your sentence, or how translation apps know the right sense of a word.
And the coolest part? These embeddings are often trained in huge, invisible spacesâsometimes with hundreds of dimensions. We canât imagine it, but machines can map relationships in places we canât even visualize.
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