embedding
A list of numbers that captures the meaning of a piece of text, so similar ideas sit close together.
An embedding turns a word, sentence or document into a long list of numbers. Texts with similar meaning get similar numbers, even if they use different words. This lets software measure how close two pieces of text are in meaning. Search, recommendations and document matching are often built on embeddings.
Think of it as
Like pinning every document on a huge map by topic. "Refund request" and "I want my money back" land next to each other, even though they share no words.
Example
A help centre stores an embedding for every article. When a customer types "can't log in on my phone", the system finds the article titled "Mobile sign-in problems", because their meanings sit close together.