Word2Vec clustering: embed with low dimensionality or with high dimensionality and then reduce?

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I am using K-means for topic modelling using Word2Vec and would like to understand the implications of vectorizing up to, let's say, 10 dimensions, against embedding it with 200 dimensions and then using PCA to get down to 10. Does the second approach make sense at all?

1 Answers

Which one worked better for your specific purposes, & your specific data, after trying both & comparing the end-results against each other, either in some ad-hoc ("eyeballing") or rigorous way?

There's no reason to prematurely reject any approach, given how many details about your data & ultimate end-goals are unstated.

It would be atypical to train a word2vec model to have only 10 dimensions. Published work most often shows the use of 100 to 1000 dimensions, often 300 or 400, assuming you've got enough bulk training data to make the algorithm worthwhile.

(Word2vec needs a lot of varied training text, with many contrasting usage examples for every word of interest, to generate good results. You may occasionally see toy-sized demos, on smaller amounts of data, just to quickly show steps, or some major qualities of the results. But good results, in the aspects for which word2vec is most appreciated, depend on plentiful training data.)

Also, whether or not your aims would be helped by the extra step of PCA to reduce the dimensionality of a larger word2vec model seems another separable question, to be determined experimentally by comparing results with and without that step, on your actual data/problem, rather than guessed at from intuitions from other projects that might not be comparable.

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