Thoughts about character-based word embedding and vocabularies in NLP:character:word:embedding:vocabulary: Goal In this summary we compare the two standard methods of single character embedding and full word embedding. Motivation In order to teach a computer to understand words in order to perform natural language tasks, we have to map characters or words to a vector space the computer naturally acts on. Steps The mapping of character, words or even complete sentences into a vector space is usually called embedding. Given some text, there are two distinct methods to compute word embeddings manageable by a computer. Children learning to read to start by recognizing individual characters before they are able to understand the meaning of words.