FastText vs. Word2vec: A Quick Comparison
One of the questions that often comes up is what’s the difference between fastText and Word2Vec? Aren’t they both the same?
Yes and no. They are conceptually the same, but there is a minor difference—fastText operates at a character level but Word2Vec operates at a word level. Why this difference?
Before we dive into fastText , let’s quickly recap what Word2Vec is. With Word2Vec, we train a neural network with a single hidden layer to predict a target word based on its context (neighboring words). The assumption is that the meaning of a word can be inferred by the company it keeps. Under the hood, when