diff --git a/adnc/utils/word_embedding.py b/adnc/utils/word_embedding.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c977d0e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/adnc/utils/word_embedding.py
@@ -0,0 +1,140 @@
+# Copyright 2018 Jörg Franke
+#
+# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
+# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
+# You may obtain a copy of the License at
+#
+#    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
+#
+# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
+# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
+# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
+# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
+# limitations under the License.
+# ==============================================================================
+import numpy as np
+import os
+import pickle
+import urllib.request
+import zipfile
+import hashlib
+from collections import OrderedDict
+import tensorflow as tf
+
+
+class WordEmbedding():
+    def __init__(self, embedding_size, vocabulary_size=None, word_idx_dict=None, initialization='uniform', tmp_dir='.',
+                 dtype=tf.float32, seed=123):
+
+        self.rng = np.random.RandomState(seed)
+
+        if vocabulary_size == None:
+            vocabulary_size = word_idx_dict.__len__()
+
+        if initialization == 'uniform':
+            init_tensor = self.initialize_random(vocabulary_size, embedding_size, dtype)
+        elif initialization == 'glove':
+            init_tensor = self.initialize_with_glove(word_idx_dict, embedding_size, tmp_dir, dtype)
+
+        self.embeddings = tf.Variable(init_tensor, dtype=dtype, name='word_embedding')
+
+    def embed(self, word_idx):
+        embed = tf.nn.embedding_lookup(self.embeddings, word_idx, name='embedding_lookup')
+        return embed
+
+    def initialize_random(self, vocabulary_size, embedding_size, dtype):
+        return tf.random_uniform([vocabulary_size, embedding_size], -1.0, 1.0, dtype=dtype)
+
+    def initialize_with_glove(self, word_idx_dict, embedding_size, tmp_dir, dtype):
+
+        if embedding_size == 100:
+            glove_type = '6B'
+        elif embedding_size == 300:
+            glove_type = '42B'
+        else:
+            raise UserWarning('embedding size incompatible to glove word representations')
+
+        embeddings = self.get_glove_embeddings(tmp_dir, glove_type, embedding_size, word_idx_dict)
+        return embeddings
+
+    @staticmethod
+    def make_dict_hash(dictionary):
+        pre = sorted(((k, v) for k, v in dictionary.items()))
+        sort_dict = OrderedDict()
+        for element in pre:
+            if type(element[1]) == dict:
+                element_sort = OrderedDict(sorted(element[1].items()))
+                for key, value in element_sort.items():
+                    sort_value = sorted(value.items())
+                    sort_dict[key] = sort_value
+            else:
+                sort_dict[element[0]] = element[1]
+
+        hash_object = hashlib.md5(str(sort_dict).encode())
+        hash = str(hash_object.hexdigest())
+        return hash
+
+    def get_glove_embeddings(self, glove_path, glove_set, glove_dim, word_idx_dict):
+
+        dict_hash = self.make_dict_hash(word_idx_dict)
+        embeddings_file = os.path.join(glove_path,
+                                       'glove_embeddings_{}_{}_{}.plk'.format(dict_hash, glove_set, glove_dim))
+
+        if os.path.isfile(embeddings_file):
+            with open(embeddings_file, 'rb') as dict_file:
+                embeddings = pickle.load(dict_file)
+        else:
+            embeddings = self.prepare_glove_embeddings(glove_path, glove_set, glove_dim, word_idx_dict)
+            self.save_glove_embeddings(embeddings_file, embeddings)
+        return embeddings
+
+    @staticmethod
+    def save_glove_embeddings(embeddings_file, embeddings):
+        with open(embeddings_file, 'wb') as dict_file:
+            pickle.dump(embeddings, dict_file)
+
+    def prepare_glove_embeddings(self, glove_path, glove_set, glove_dim, word_idx_dict):
+
+        glove_embeddings_file = os.path.join(glove_path, "glove.{}.{}d.txt".format(glove_set, glove_dim))
+
+        if not os.path.isfile(glove_embeddings_file):
+            print("### Download GloVe Word Representation")
+            if glove_set == '6B':
+                url = 'http://nlp.stanford.edu/data/glove.6B.zip'
+            elif glove_set == '42B':
+                url = 'http://nlp.stanford.edu/data/glove.42B.300d.zip'
+            elif glove_set == '840B':
+                url = 'http://nlp.stanford.edu/data/glove.840B.300d.zip'
+
+            file_name = url.split('/')[-1]
+            zip_path = os.path.join(glove_path, file_name)
+            filehandle, _ = urllib.request.urlretrieve(url, zip_path)
+            zip_file = zipfile.ZipFile(zip_path)
+            zip_file.extractall(glove_path)
+            zip_file.close()
+            os.remove(zip_path)
+
+        glove_dict = OrderedDict()
+        with open(glove_embeddings_file, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as gl:
+            for line in gl:
+                array = line.lstrip().rstrip().split(" ")
+                word = array[0]
+                vector = list(map(float, array[1:]))
+                vector = np.asarray(vector)
+                glove_dict[word.lower()] = vector
+
+        # aline vocabulary with GloVe vectors
+        embeddings = np.empty([word_idx_dict.__len__(), glove_dim])
+        OOV = []
+        for word, idx in word_idx_dict.items():
+            try:
+                vec = glove_dict[word]
+                embeddings[idx, :] = vec
+            except:
+                OOV.append(word)
+                rand_vec = self.rng.uniform(-1, 1, glove_dim)
+                embeddings[idx, :] = rand_vec
+        del (glove_dict)
+
+        print('### Word Embeddings: Out of vocabulary words: {}'.format(OOV.__len__()))
+        return embeddings