vector

Definition

An ordered list of numbers; in practice, the concrete form an embedding takes, placing an item at a point in a learned space. Because similarity reduces to a dot product or cosine, retrieval, recommendation, and clustering all become geometry. A vector database is infrastructure for the resulting problem: approximate nearest-neighbour search over millions of these arrays, fast enough to serve online. A tensor is the same idea with more axes.

Explainers using this term

• Embeddings from Scratch — from word2vec Intuition to Contextual EmbeddingsEfficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space