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

What is a word representation or meaning?


What is meant by the word meaning? This is more of a philosophical question than a technical one. So, we will not try to discern the most proper answer for this question, but accept a more modest answer, that is, meaning is the idea or the representation conveyed by a word. Since the primary objective of NLP is to achieve human-like performance in linguistic tasks, it is sensible to explore principled ways of representing words for machines. To achieve this, we will use algorithms that can analyze a given text corpus and come up with good numerical representations of words (that is, word embeddings), such that words that fall within similar contexts (for example, one and two, I and we) will have similar numerical representations compared with words that are irrelevant (for example, cat and volcano).

First, we will discuss some classical approaches to achieve this and then move on to understanding more sophisticated recent methods that use neural networks...