Overview

snaut allows to measure distance between words or documents and explore distributional semantics models through a convenient interface. It was created primarily as a tool for psycholinguists that can be used to measure similarities between words.

Words and phrases

The interface allows to work with single words or with phrases composed of multiple words. In fact you can even think about a whole document as a very long phrese. If you enter a multi-word phrase to the input field it will be represented by the model as a sum of the vectors of all its words. If any of the words used in the phrase is not present in the loaded semantic space, snaut will not be able to compute the vector for this phrase and, as the result, it will ignore the whole phrase.

The phrases need to be entered as a list of words separated with spaces (interpuction must be removed).

Menus

Neighbours

This menu allows to look up nearest neighbours of a set of words. For example, in order to check what are the words with a smallest distance to brain and dinosaur, type in brain and dinosaur into the input box on separate lines and press Calculate. You can choose the metric that is used to compute distance in the space.

You can also try to enter phrases composed of multiple words, for instance compare behavior, research and behavior research.

Matrix

If you need to obtain measurements for a large number of words, you can use the matrix menu.

The words for which you need the scores should be entered in the input form on the left. Each word or phrase should be entered in a separate line. Next, in the dropdown menu you can choose what kind of comparison do you want to make. The available options are:

• distances between all pairs of words in the list
• distances between the words in the list and all other words in the loaded semantic space
• distances between all pairs of words between the left input field and the right input field

When you click on Calculate, snaut will compute the scores and, after this is finished, it will initialize download of a file with the results. The file is in a CSV format: it contains a table in a plain text with columns separated with commas.

You can read in the list of words to the text field from a file on your disc by clicking on the Load from a file button below the target input field. The Check availability button can be used check whether all words specified in the input field are present in the semantic space. Keep in mind that, if some of the words are not in the space, snaut will ignore them when computing the semantic distance measures.

Pairwise

You can use this menu to investigate distances between individual pairs of words/documents. Each pair should be entered on a separate row in the input field and elements of the pair should be speparated with a colon (':') . After clicking on the Calculate button, snaut will do the calculation and a download of a CSV file with the result will be initialized.

For instance, in order to calculate the distance between pairs of words: home and window, car and wheel, fast car and slow car. You should enter:

home : window
car : wheel
car : cloud
fast car : slow car

Similarily to the Matrix interface you can load the list of pairs from a text file or check the availability of the words in the semantic space.

Analogy

snaut implements an offset method described by Mikolov, Yih, & Zweig (2013). The analogy interface allows you to perform algebraic operations using vector semantic space and capture some regularities in the language.

The classical example involves the computation king - man + woman which results in a vector very close to queen.

The computation can be performed by entering the words vectors of which you want to have positive or negative contribution in the calculation. For instance, in order to calculate king - man + woman you need to enter king, woman in the field positive vectors and man in the field negative vectors.