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

Understanding Neural Machine Translation


Now that we have an appreciation for how machine translation has evolved over time, let's try to understand how state-of-the-art NMT works. First, we will take a look at the model architecture used by neural machine translators and then move on to understanding the actual training algorithm.

Intuition behind NMT

First, let's understand the intuition underlying an NMT system's design. Say, you are a fluent English and German speaker and were asked to translate the following sentence to English:

Ich ging nach Hause

This sentence translates to the following:

I went home

Although it might not have taken more than few seconds for a fluent person to translate this, there is a certain process involved in the translation. First, you read the German sentence, and then you create a thought or concept about what this sentence represents or implies. And finally, you translate the sentence to English. The same idea is used for building NMT systems (see Figure 10...