Spec2Vec learns fragmental relationships within a large set of spectral data to derive abstract spectral embeddings that can be used to assess spectral similarities. Here, we introduce Spec2Vec, a novel spectral similarity score inspired by a natural language processing algorithm-Word2Vec. Although weaknesses in the relationship between spectral similarity scores and the true structural similarities have been described, little development of alternative scores has been undertaken.
Spectral similarity is used as a proxy for structural similarity in many tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based metabolomics analyses such as library matching and molecular networking.