Vulnerability assessment of power systems is important so as to determine their ability to continue to provide service in case of any unforeseen catastrophic contingency such as power system component failures, communication system failures, human operator error, and natural calamity. An approach towards the development of on-line power system vulnerability assessment is by means of using an artificial neural network(ANN), which is being used successfully in many areas of power systems because of its ability to handle the fusion of multiple sources of data and information. An important consideration when applying ANN in power system vulnerability assessment is the proper selection and dimension reduction of training features. This paper aims to investigate the effect of using various feature extraction methods on the performance of ANN as well as to evaluate and compare the efficiency of the proposed feature extraction method named as neural network weight extraction. For assessing vulnerability of power systems, a vulnerability index based on power system loss is used and considered as the ANN output. To illustrate the effectiveness of ANN considering various feature extraction methods for vulnerability assessment on a large sized power system, it is verified on the IEEE 300-bus test system.