About

Gensim = “Generate Similar”

Gensim started off as a collection of various Python scripts for the Czech Digital Mathematics Library dml.cz in 2008, where it served to generate a short list of the most similar articles to a given article.

I also wanted to try these fancy “Latent Semantic Methods”, but the libraries that realized the necessary computation were not much fun to work with.

Naturally, I set out to reinvent the wheel. Our 2010 LREC publication describes the initial design decisions behind Gensim: clarity, efficiency and scalability. It is fairly representative of how Gensim works even today.

Later versions of gensim improved this efficiency and scalability tremendously. In fact, I made algorithmic scalability of distributional semantics the topic of my PhD thesis.

By now, Gensim is—to my knowledge—the most robust, efficient and hassle-free piece of software to realize unsupervised semantic modelling from plain text. It stands in contrast to brittle homework-assignment-implementations that do not scale on one hand, and robust java-esque projects that take forever just to run “hello world”.

In 2011, I started using Github for source code hosting and the Gensim website moved to its present domain. In 2013, Gensim got its current logo and website design.

Licensing

Gensim is licensed under the OSI-approved GNU LGPLv2.1 license. This means that it’s free for both personal and commercial use, but if you make any modification to Gensim that you distribute to other people, you have to disclose the source code of these modifications.

Apart from that, you are free to redistribute Gensim in any way you like, though you’re not allowed to modify its license (doh!).

My intent here is to get more help and community involvement with the development of Gensim. The legalese is therefore less important to me than your input and contributions.

Contact me if LGPL doesn’t fit your bill and you’d like the open source restrictions lifted.

See also

We also built a commercial product for automatic data discovery for privacy compliance, https://pii-tools.com.

Reach out at info@pii-tools.com if you need industry-grade PII / PCI / PHI software for compliance or breach management.

Contributors

Credit goes to the many people who contributed to Gensim, be it in discussions, ideas, code contributions or bug reports.

It’s really useful and motivating to get feedback, in any shape or form, so big thanks to you all!

Some honorable mentions are included in the CHANGELOG.txt.

Academic citing

Gensim has been used in over a thousand research paper and student theses.

When citing Gensim, please use this BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{rehurek_lrec,
      title = {{Software Framework for Topic Modelling with Large Corpora}},
      author = {Radim {\v R}eh{\r u}{\v r}ek and Petr Sojka},
      booktitle = {{Proceedings of the LREC 2010 Workshop on New
           Challenges for NLP Frameworks}},
      pages = {45--50},
      year = 2010,
      month = May,
      day = 22,
      publisher = {ELRA},
      address = {Valletta, Malta},
      note={\url{http://is.muni.cz/publication/884893/en}},
      language={English}
}