Book Image

Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow

By : Motaz Saad, Thushan Ganegedara
Book Image

Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow

By: Motaz Saad, Thushan Ganegedara

Overview of this book

Natural language processing (NLP) supplies the majority of data available to deep learning applications, while TensorFlow is the most important deep learning framework currently available. Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow brings TensorFlow and NLP together to give you invaluable tools to work with the immense volume of unstructured data in today’s data streams, and apply these tools to specific NLP tasks. Thushan Ganegedara starts by giving you a grounding in NLP and TensorFlow basics. You'll then learn how to use Word2vec, including advanced extensions, to create word embeddings that turn sequences of words into vectors accessible to deep learning algorithms. Chapters on classical deep learning algorithms, like convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), demonstrate important NLP tasks as sentence classification and language generation. You will learn how to apply high-performance RNN models, like long short-term memory (LSTM) cells, to NLP tasks. You will also explore neural machine translation and implement a neural machine translator. After reading this book, you will gain an understanding of NLP and you'll have the skills to apply TensorFlow in deep learning NLP applications, and how to perform specific NLP tasks.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow
Contributors
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important tool for understanding and processing the immense volume of unstructured data in today's world. Recently, deep learning has been widely adopted for many NLP tasks because of the remarkable performance that deep learning algorithms have shown in a plethora of challenging tasks, such as, image classification, speech recognition, and realistic text generation. TensorFlow, in turn, is one of the most intuitive and efficient deep learning frameworks currently in existence. This book will enable aspiring deep learning developers to handle massive amounts of data using NLP and TensorFlow.

In this chapter, we will provide an introduction to NLP and to the rest of the book. We will answer the question, "What is Natural Language Processing?" Also, we'll look at some of its most important uses. We will also consider the traditional approaches and the more recent deep learning-based approaches to NLP, including a Fully-Connected Neural Network (FCNN). Finally, we will conclude with an overview of the rest of the book and the technical tools we will be using.