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No, because "quality" means two different things here. I believe the main reason word2vec became important was purely on the software/engineering side, not beca
by nicklecompte 3y ago
No, because "quality" means two different things here. I believe the main reason word2vec became important was purely on the software/engineering side, not because it was scientifically novel. Advancements in Python development, especially good higher-level constructs around numerical linear algebra, meant that the fairly shallow and simple tools of word2vec were available to almost every tech company. So I don't think word2vec was (or is) particularly good research, but it became good software for reasons beyond its own control
In 2016 or so it was proven that word2vec is equivalent to the pointwise mutual information between the words in its training set, after doing some preprocessing. This means that Claude Shannon had things mostly figured out in the 60s, and some reviewers were quite critical of the word2vec paper for not citing similar developments in the 70s.