Word2Vec: Number of Dimensions

Question

I am using Word2Vec with a dataset of roughly 11,000,000 tokens looking to do both word similarity (as part of synonym extraction for a downstream task) but I don\'t have a

Answer 1

Typical interval is between 100-300. I would say you need at least 50D to achieve lowest accuracy. If you pick lesser number of dimensions, you will start to lose properties of high dimensional spaces. If training time is not a big deal for your application, i would stick with 200D dimensions as it gives nice features. Extreme accuracy can be obtained with 300D. After 300D word features won't improve dramatically, and training will be extremely slow.

I do not know theoretical explanation and strict bounds of dimension selection in high dimensional spaces (and there might not a application-independent explanation for that), but I would refer you to Pennington et. al, Figure2a where x axis shows vector dimension and y axis shows the accuracy obtained. That should provide empirical justification to above argument.

Answer 2

The number of dimensions reflects the over/under fitting. 100-300 dimensions is the common knowledge. Start with one number and check the accuracy of your testing set versus training set. The bigger the dimension size the easier it will be overfit on the training set and had bad performance on the test. Tuning this parameter is required in case you have high accuracy on training set and low accuracy on the testing set, this means that the dimension size is too big and reducing it might solve the overfitting problem of your model.

Answer 3

I think that the number of dimensions from word2vec depends on your application. The most empirical value is about 100. Then it can perform well.