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Understanding and Applying Text Embeddings
Beginner
1 hour 24 mins
Topics
Embeddings
GenAI Applications
NLP
RAG
Search and Retrieval
Embeddings is one of those technologies that I think is just really cool. In this video, let's take a look together at how embeddings work. Let's dive in. As you saw a bit from the previous video, an embedding gives a way of representing data as points in space where the locations are semantically meaningful. The word semantics just means meaning, so it means the location captures something about the meaning of a piece of text. So, you might input a sentence like, missing flamingo discovered at swimming pool, and I'll put an embedding like that. And if you were to embed multiple sentences, then hopefully, missing flamingo discovered, as well as sea otter spotted on surfboard by beach, or baby panda enjoys boat ride. All of these may be more similar locations to each other. Whereas a sentence like, breakfast in food truck beloved by all, and new curry restaurant is delightful, those would be further away. And the pair-wise distances between these animals, and water related sentences will be much greater than the pair-wise distance between, say, the flamingo sentence and the breakfast-themed sentence. So, how are these embeddings computed? On this next slide, I'm going to get a little bit more technical, so bear with me. But everything on this slide is optional. So, you skip through it, it's totally fine. And nothing on this slide will be required for uh, for completing the rest of this short course. So actually, fine if you decide to skip this material. But, if you were to build your own embeddings, then one simple method would be to embed each word in a sentence separately, and then take a sum or a mean, you know, say of all of the individual words' embeddings. So for a long time, the dominant approach to computing embeddings would be to have a list of all the most commonly occurring English words. And for each word, we would separately train a set of parameters to give an embedding just for that word. And then, if you have a sentence, you can take an average of all of them, and that's how you would embed a sentence. But, as you saw already in the previous lesson, this means that the sentence-level embedding doesn't understand word ordering. So, modern embeddings do something more sophisticated. We instead can use a transformer neural network to compute a context-aware representation of each word. And then, we can take an average of the context-aware embeddings. And if you don't know what this diagram is doing, don't worry about it. But what a transformer neural network does is, very loosely, it takes each word and then computes an embedding for that word. Also, takes into account what other words appear in the sentence. So that's why, taking an example from our previous lesson, the word play, is it kids playing or is it a play in the sense of a show? Those two words play will end up with different representations, with different vector embeddings because they have different meanings, which the transformer network can figure out by looking at the context of the surrounding words. But by doing this, you get a much more sophisticated embedding. But by using this approach, you get an embedding of a sentence that takes into account much more of the meaning of each word, because the word play can mean different things in different contexts. And then, there's one other modification to this idea, which makes it even more powerful, which is instead of using a predefined list of words, modern embeddings will compute embeddings for each token, and tokens will often correspond to subwords. And the nice thing about that is it enables the algorithm to work even for novel words and even for misspelled words. So, if I were to write the unverse, misspelled universe and everything, just title of one of my favorite novels. It will still compute an embedding for this life, the unverse and everything that will be, you know, pretty okay, even though I misspelled universe. Whereas in contrast, if you're using a traditional embedding technique, then the misspelled unverse won't get mapped to an embedding anywhere close to the word universe. And modern large language models take sentences and break them down into subwords called tokens and by learning embeddings for tokens, you can throw any string at it, and it will still, you know, generate some hopefully meaningful embedding. So, this is how embeddings are computed. How are embeddings learned? So, the technique used to train the transformer neural networks parameters is a technique called contrastive learning. Different research groups are still experimenting with different techniques for computing embeddings. But loosely, you would first pre-train the transformer network on a lot of text data. So, this is how large language models are trained. Train it on a lot of unlabeled text data off the internet or off other sources. And then, you would find a data set of pairs of, quote, similar sentences, and then tune the neural network to move the embeddings of more similar sentences together and move dissimilar sentences' embeddings apart. So, how do you know if two sentences are similar or dissimilar? Similar sentences can be whatever you define. But, if you have a way of finding a database of similar sentences, and there are a few of these online, that could be one way. Or if your goal is to build a question answering system, you can also declare that a question and its corresponding answer are similar. And that will tend to cause the neural network to push the answer to a question closer to the answer embedding of that question. And decimal sentences are often just randomly sampled pairs of sentences because, you know, if you randomly pick two sentences, probably they're not that similar to each other in meaning. But today, researchers are still playing around with different variations on this basic recipe, which is why embedding algorithms are still getting better every few months. And it's all an exciting space for research, but they do work well enough for us to just use them right now. And in particular, later in this short course, Nikita will go through how to use text embeddings in a range of applications, including text classification, clustering, outline detection, and semantic search. And then, we won't talk about product recommendations much in this short course. We can also imagine if you bought products X, Y, and Z, then by using embeddings to find what are similar products based on the product description to stuff that you like. This is also very useful for finding product recommendations. I just want to share one other fun thing with you, which is multimodal embeddings. We won't really cover this in depth in this short course again, but closer to the cutting edge of embeddings is embeddings that can embed both text as well as pictures into the same, say 768 dimensional space. So, we've talked about how you can take a piece of text and map that to a 768-dimensional. It turns out that there are multi-modal algorithms, and the term multi-modal refers to that it can process either text or pictures, so data of multi-different modalities, and researchers are working on audio as well, but if a piece of text, oranges are in season, are embedded to a point like that, there are algorithms that can also take a picture of a bunch of oranges, and hopefully embed that picture of the oranges in the location and space that is close to text about oranges. And so these multi-modal embeddings, you can embed text and pictures into the same space, are another exciting development that is slowly opening up even more applications that you can build that understand both text and pictures. So, that's it for embeddings. And with that, let's go on to the next video to play more of these embeddings and visualize some of their properties. Let's go on to the next video.
Understanding and Applying Text Embeddings