When Should I Consider To Use Pretrain-model Word2vec Model Weights?

Suppose my corpus is reasonably large - having tens-of-thousands of unique words. I can either use it to build a word2vec model directly(Approach #1 in the code below) or initializ

Solution 1:

The general answer to this type of question is: you should try them both, and see which works better for your purposes.

No one without your exact data & project goals can be sure which will work better in your situation, and you'll need to exact same kind of ability-to-evaluate alterante choices to do all sorts of very basic, necessary tuning of your work.

Separately:

• "fine-tuning" word2vec-vectors can mean many things, and can introduce a number of expert-leve thorny tradeoff-decisions - the sorts of tradeoffs that can only be navigated if you've got a robust way to test different choices against each other.
• The specific simple tuning approach your code shows - which relies on an experimental method (intersect_word2vec_format()) that might not work in the latest Gensim – is pretty limited, and since it discards all the words in the outside vectors that aren't already in your own corpus, also discards one of the major reasons people often want to mix older vectors in - to cover more words not in their training data. (I doubt that approach will be useful in many cases, but as per above, to be sure you'd want to try it with respect to your data/goals.
• It's almost always a bad idea to use min_count=1 with word2vec & similar algorithms. If such rare words are truly important, find more training examples so good vectors can be trained for them. But without enough training examples, they're usually better to ignore - keeping them even makes the vectors for surrounding words worse.