Visual Exploration of Word Vector Embeddings

The use of word vector embeddings as the basis for many upstream tasks in text processing has lead to large improvements in accuracy. However, the exact reasons for this success largely remain unclear, as the properties and relations that these embeddings encode are often not well understood. Our goal in this ongoing project is to design effective interactive visualizations that help practitioners and researchers understand and compare such spaces better. The initial steps we have taken is to review relevant literature to identify properties and relations of word vectors that are important for various applications. From these, we derive basic tasks to inform the design of adequate and effective interactive visualizations that help users gain deeper insights into the structure of vector spaces. In addition, we present three initial designs to support these tasks.