{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/multi-hash-embeddings-in-spacy","title":"Multi hash embeddings in spaCy","arxiv_id":"2212.09255","date":"2022-12-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Lester James Miranda","Ákos Kádár","Adriane Boyd","Sofie Van Landeghem","Anders Søgaard","Matthew Honnibal"],"abstract":"The distributed representation of symbols is one of the key technologies in machine learning systems today, playing a pivotal role in modern natural language processing. Traditional word embeddings associate a separate vector with each word. While this approach is simple and leads to good performance, it requires a lot of memory for representing a large vocabulary. To reduce the memory footprint, the default embedding layer in spaCy is a hash embeddings layer. It is a stochastic approximation of traditional embeddings that provides unique vectors for a large number of words without explicitly storing a separate vector for each of them. To be able to compute meaningful representations for both known and unknown words, hash embeddings represent each word as a summary of the normalized word form, subword information and word shape. Together, these features produce a multi-embedding of a word. In this technical report we lay out a bit of history and introduce the embedding methods in spaCy in detail. Second, we critically evaluate the hash embedding architecture with multi-embeddings on Named Entity Recognition datasets from a variety of domains and languages. The experiments validate most key design choices behind spaCy's embedders, but we also uncover a few surprising results.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.09255v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.09255v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"multi-hash-embeddings-in-spacy","repo_url":"https://github.com/explosion/projects/tree/v3/benchmarks/ner_embeddings","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"named-entity-recognition-1","task_name":"Named Entity Recognition"},{"task_slug":"named-entity-recognition-ner","task_name":"Named Entity Recognition (NER)"},{"task_slug":"word-embeddings","task_name":"Word Embeddings"},{"task_slug":"named-entity-recognition","task_name":"named-entity-recognition"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2212.09255","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}