How to remove a word completely from a Word2Vec model in gensim?

Question

Given a model, e.g.

from gensim.models.word2vec import Word2Vec


documents = ["Human machine interface for lab abc computer applications",
"A survey of user opinion of computer system response time",
"The EPS user interface management system",
"System and human system engineering testing of EPS",
"Relation of user perceived response time to error measurement",
"The generation of random binary unordered trees",
"The intersection graph of paths in trees",
"Graph minors IV Widths of trees and well quasi ordering",
"Graph minors A survey"]

texts = [d.lower().split() for d in documents]

w2v_model = Word2Vec(texts, size=5, window=5, min_count=1, workers=10)

It's possible to remove the word from the w2v vocabulary, e.g.

# Originally, it's there.
>>> print(w2v_model['graph'])
[-0.00401433  0.08862179  0.08601206  0.05281207 -0.00673626]

>>> print(w2v_model.wv.vocab['graph'])
Vocab(count:3, index:5, sample_int:750148289)

# Find most similar words.
>>> print(w2v_model.most_similar('graph'))
[('binary', 0.6781558990478516), ('a', 0.6284914612770081), ('unordered', 0.5971308350563049), ('perceived', 0.5612867474555969), ('iv', 0.5470727682113647), ('error', 0.5346164703369141), ('machine', 0.480206698179245), ('quasi', 0.256790429353714), ('relation', 0.2496253103017807), ('trees', 0.2276223599910736)]

# We can delete it from the dictionary
>>> del w2v_model.wv.vocab['graph']
>>> print(w2v_model['graph'])
KeyError: "word 'graph' not in vocabulary"

But when we do a similarity on other words after deleting graph, we see the word graph popping up, e.g.

>>> w2v_model.most_similar('binary')
[('unordered', 0.8710334300994873), ('ordering', 0.8463168144226074), ('perceived', 0.7764195203781128), ('error', 0.7316686511039734), ('graph', 0.6781558990478516), ('generation', 0.5770125389099121), ('computer', 0.40017056465148926), ('a', 0.2762695848941803), ('testing', 0.26335978507995605), ('trees', 0.1948457509279251)]

How to remove a word completely from a Word2Vec model in gensim?

---

Updated

To answer @vumaasha's comment:

could you give some details as to why you want to delete a word

• Lets say my universe of words in all words in the corpus to learn the dense relations between all words.

• But when I want to generate the similar words, it should only come from a subset of domain specific word.

• It's possible to generate more than enough from .most_similar() then filter the words but lets say the space of the specific domain is small, I might be looking for a word that's ranked 1000th most similar which is inefficient.

• It would be better if the word is totally removed from the word vectors then the .most_similar() words won't return words outside of the specific domain.

Answer 1

I wrote a function which removes words from KeyedVectors which aren't in a predefined word list.

def restrict_w2v(w2v, restricted_word_set):
    new_vectors = []
    new_vocab = {}
    new_index2entity = []
    new_vectors_norm = []

    for i in range(len(w2v.vocab)):
        word = w2v.index2entity[i]
        vec = w2v.vectors[i]
        vocab = w2v.vocab[word]
        vec_norm = w2v.vectors_norm[i]
        if word in restricted_word_set:
            vocab.index = len(new_index2entity)
            new_index2entity.append(word)
            new_vocab[word] = vocab
            new_vectors.append(vec)
            new_vectors_norm.append(vec_norm)

    w2v.vocab = new_vocab
    w2v.vectors = new_vectors
    w2v.index2entity = new_index2entity
    w2v.index2word = new_index2entity
    w2v.vectors_norm = new_vectors_norm

It rewrites all of the variables which are related to the words based on the Word2VecKeyedVectors.

Usage:

w2v = KeyedVectors.load_word2vec_format("GoogleNews-vectors-negative300.bin.gz", binary=True)
w2v.most_similar("beer")

[('beers', 0.8409687876701355),
('lager', 0.7733745574951172),
('Beer', 0.71753990650177),
('drinks', 0.668931245803833),
('lagers', 0.6570086479187012),
('Yuengling_Lager', 0.655455470085144),
('microbrew', 0.6534324884414673),
('Brooklyn_Lager', 0.6501551866531372),
('suds', 0.6497018337249756),
('brewed_beer', 0.6490240097045898)]

restricted_word_set = {"beer", "wine", "computer", "python", "bash", "lagers"}
restrict_w2v(w2v, restricted_word_set)
w2v.most_similar("beer")

[('lagers', 0.6570085287094116),
('wine', 0.6217695474624634),
('bash', 0.20583480596542358),
('computer', 0.06677375733852386),
('python', 0.005948573350906372)]

Answer 2

There is no direct way to do what you are looking for. However, you are not completely lost. The method most_similar is implemented in the class WordEmbeddingsKeyedVectors (check the link). You can take a look at this method and modify it to suit your needs.

The lines shown below perform the actual logic of computing the similar words, you need to replace the variable limited with vectors corresponding to words of your interest. Then you are done

limited = self.vectors_norm if restrict_vocab is None else self.vectors_norm[:restrict_vocab]
        dists = dot(limited, mean)
        if not topn:
            return dists
best = matutils.argsort(dists, topn=topn + len(all_words), reverse=True)

Update:

limited = self.vectors_norm if restrict_vocab is None else self.vectors_norm[:restrict_vocab]

If you see this line, it means if restrict_vocab is used it restricts top n words in the vocab, it is meaningful only if you have sorted the vocab by frequency. If you are not passing restrict_vocab, self.vectors_norm is what goes into limited

the method most_similar calls another method init_sims. This initializes the value for [self.vector_norm][4] like shown below

        self.vectors_norm = (self.vectors / sqrt((self.vectors ** 2).sum(-1))[..., newaxis]).astype(REAL)

so, you can pickup the words that you are interested in, prepare their norm and use it in place of limited. This should work