http://programmer.ie/tags/editorial-memory/ Recent content in Editorial Memory on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming Hugo en-us Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:10:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/books/embeddings-from-first-principles/23-chapter/ Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:10:00 +0000 http://programmer.ie/books/embeddings-from-first-principles/23-chapter/ <p><em>Part VII — What Survives Transformation</em></p> <h2 id="the-other-thing-a-subtraction-might-mean">The other thing a subtraction might mean</h2> <p><code>king − man + woman ≈ queen</code> is the famous demonstration that a <em>direction</em> in embedding space can correspond to a semantic relation. It is also, as Chapter 2 noted, partly curated and works best locally — and it has a long list of documented problems: the offset method&rsquo;s success is entangled with plain cosine-neighbourhood structure, so a &ldquo;the direction transfers&rdquo; result has to beat the baseline of <em>ignoring the offset and returning the nearest neighbour of the source word</em> (<a href="https://aclanthology.org/W16-2503/">Linzen, 2016</a>); and performance varies wildly by relation type (<a href="https://aclanthology.org/S17-1017/">Rogers, Drozd &amp; Li, 2017</a>).</p>