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Word2Vec is a neural network-based technique for learning word embeddings, developed by researchers at Google. It transforms words into continuous vector representations in a multi-dimensional space, capturing semantic relationships based on context. Word2Vec uses two main architectures: Skip-gram, which predicts surrounding words given a target word, and Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW), which predicts a target word based on surrounding words. By training on large text corpora, Word2Vec generates word embeddings where similar words are positioned closely, enabling tasks like semantic similarity, analogy solving, and text clustering. The model was influential in advancing NLP by introducing efficient training techniques such as hierarchical softmax and negative sampling. Though newer embedding models like BERT and Transformer-based methods have surpassed it in complexity and performance, Word2Vec remains a foundational method in natural language processing and machine learning research.

LexVec is a word embedding model that achieves state-of-the-art results in multiple natural language processing tasks by factorizing the Positive Pointwise Mutual Information (PPMI) matrix using stochastic gradient descent. This approach assigns heavier penalties for errors on frequent co-occurrences while accounting for negative co-occurrences. Pre-trained vectors are available, including a common crawl dataset with 58 billion tokens and 2 million words in 300 dimensions, and an English Wikipedia 2015 + NewsCrawl dataset with 7 billion tokens and 368,999 words in 300 dimensions. Evaluations demonstrate that LexVec matches or outperforms other models like word2vec in terms of word similarity and analogy tasks. The implementation is open source under the MIT License and is available on GitHub.