Vector
A unique list of numbers
A vector is a unique fixed-sized list of numbers. Each vector number is called a coordinate. Coordinates define the vector’s position in a particular space. Vectors represent data in a way that a machine learning model can understand and use. In machine translation, vectors represent the words and phrases in a text.
Example of a vector:
cat = [0.049, 0.121, 0.503, 0.888]
Each coordinate corresponds to a specific aspect of the word or phrase.
Vectors encode information:
- Meaning and sense
- Part of speech
- Grammatical features, like verb tense or noun case
- Relationship to other words in the sentence
Vectors are used as algorithms input. Algorithms analyse the vector meaning to produce the corresponding translation.
For example, vectors can help to identify a sentence subject and verb, and then use this information to generate a translation.
Vectors can also be used to represent the relationship between different parts of a text. For example, a vector can represent the similarity between two sentences.
Vectors can be useful to identify output sentences that are grammatically correct, but are not accurate translations.