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 (“find similar”). 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) and is fairly representative of how gensim works even now.
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 java-esque projects that do scale, but only if you’re willing to sacrifice several weeks of your, your technician’s as well as your local scientist’s time just to run “hello world”.
In 2011, I started using Github for source code hosting, and the gensim website moved from university hosting to its present domain.
Gensim is licensed under the OSI-approved GNU LGPL 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 form 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, of course, 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 but you’d still like to use it – we’ll work something out.
See also
I also host a document similarity package gensim.simserver. This is a high-level interface to gensim functionality, and offers transactional remote (web-based) document similarity queries and indexing. It uses gensim to do the heavy lifting: you don’t need the simserver to use gensim, but you do need gensim to use the simserver. Note that unlike gensim, gensim.simserver is licensed under Affero GPL, which is much more restrictive for inclusion in commercial projects.
I would like to thank all the people who contributed to gensim, be it in discussions, ideas, code contributions or bug reports.
Some honorable mentions are included in the CHANGELOG.txt.
Gensim has been used in many students’ final theses as well as research papers. 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}
}