> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://emory.gitbook.io/nlp-essentials/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://emory.gitbook.io/nlp-essentials/contextual-encoding.md).

# Contextual Encoding

**Contextual representations** are representations of words, phrases, or sentences within the context of the surrounding text. Unlike word embeddings from [Word2Vec](/nlp-essentials/distributional-semantics/word2vec.md) where each word is represented by a fixed vector regardless of its context, contextual representations capture the meaning of a word or sequence of words based on their context in a particular document such that the representation of a word can vary depending on the words surrounding it, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of meaning in natural language processing tasks.

## Contents

* [Subword Tokenization](/nlp-essentials/contextual-encoding/subword-tokenization.md)
* [Recurrent Neural Networks](/nlp-essentials/contextual-encoding/recurrent-neural-networks.md)
* [Transformer](/nlp-essentials/contextual-encoding/transformer.md)
* [Encoder-Decoder Framework](/nlp-essentials/contextual-encoding/encoder-decoder-framework.md)

## References

* [Attention is All You Need](https://papers.nips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/hash/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Abstract.html), Vaswani et al., Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2017.

{% hint style="warning" %}
**Q1**: How can **document-level vector representations** be derived from [Word2Vec](/nlp-essentials/distributional-semantics/word2vec.md) word embeddings?
{% endhint %}

{% hint style="warning" %}
**Q2**: How did the embedding representation facilitate the adaption of **Neural Networks** in Natural Language Processing?
{% endhint %}

{% hint style="warning" %}
**Q3**: How are embedding representations for **Natural Language Processing** fundamentally different from ones for **Computer Vision**?
{% endhint %}


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