
Figure 2: Illustration of an embedding table for a sparse feature with batch size = 1
In a recommendation system, sparse features (e.g., User ID, Story ID) are represented by embedding tables. An embedding table E is an HxD matrix, where H is the hash size, D is the embedding dimension. Each row of E is a vector of floats. Feature hashing [5] is used to map a sparse feature to a list of indices to E, say [S1,S2, …, Sk], where 0<=Si<H. Its output value is computed as f(E[S1], E[S2], …, E[Sk]), where E[Si] is the vector at row Si, and f is called the pooling function, which is typically one of the following functions: sum, average, maximum. See Figure 2 for an illustration.