Fast_Sentence_Embeddings VS magnitude

This is a great guide.

Also - despite the fact that language model embedding [1] are currently the hot rage, good old embedding models are more than good enough for most tasks.

With just a bit of tuning, they're generally as good at many sentence embedding tasks [2], and with good libraries [3] you're getting something like 400k sentence/sec on laptop CPU versus ~4k-15k sentences/sec on a v100 for LM embeddings.

When you should use language model embeddings:

- Multilingual tasks. While some embedding models are multilingual aligned (eg. MUSE [4]), you still need to route the sentence to the correct embedding model file (you need something like langdetect). It's also cumbersome, with one 400mb file per language.

For LM embedding models, many are multilingual aligned right away.

- Tasks that are very context specific or require fine-tuning. For instance, if you're making a RAG system for medical documents, the embedding space is best when it creates larger deviations for the difference between seemingly-related medical words.

This means models with more embedding dimensions, and heavily favors LM models over classic embedding models.

1. sbert.net

2. https://collaborate.princeton.edu/en/publications/a-simple-b...

3. https://github.com/oborchers/Fast_Sentence_Embeddings

4. https://github.com/facebookresearch/MUSE

You can find some comparisons and evaluation datasets/tasks here: https://www.sbert.net/docs/pretrained_models.html

Generally MiniLM is a good baseline. For faster models you want this library:

https://github.com/oborchers/Fast_Sentence_Embeddings

For higher quality ones, just take the bigger/slower models in the SentenceTransformers library

Links: fse: https://github.com/oborchers/Fast_Sentence_Embeddings Sentence-transformers: https://github.com/oborchers/sentence-transformers

(3) FastText now supports multiple languages [2].

[1] https://github.com/plasticityai/magnitude#pre-converted-magn...

Check out Magnitude, we built it to solve that problem: https://github.com/plasticityai/magnitude

It's still loaded from a file, but heavily uses memory-mapping and caching to be speedy and not overload your RAM immediately. And in production scenarios, multiple worker processes can share that memory due to the memory mapping.

Disclaimer: I'm the author.

General language models from pymagnitude

Backed by the pymagnitude library. Pre-trained word vectors can be installed from the referenced link.