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

A brief historical tour of machine translation


Here we will discuss the history of MT. The inception of MT involved rule-based systems. Then, more statistically sound MT systems emerged. An Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) used various measures of statistics of a language to produce translations to another language. Then came the era of NMT. NMT currently holds the state of the art performance in most machine learning tasks compared with other methods.

Rule-based translation

NMT came long after statistical machine learning, and statistical machine learning has been around for more than half a century now. The inception of SMT methods dates back to 1950-60, when during one of the first recorded projects, the Georgetown-IBM experiment, more than 60 Russian sentences were translated to English.

One of the initial techniques for MT was word-based machine translation. This system performed word-to-word translations using bilingual dictionaries. However, as you can imagine, this method has serious...