Book Image

fastText Quick Start Guide

By : Joydeep Bhattacharjee
Book Image

fastText Quick Start Guide

By: Joydeep Bhattacharjee

Overview of this book

Facebook's fastText library handles text representation and classification, used for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Most organizations have to deal with enormous amounts of text data on a daily basis, and gaining efficient data insights requires powerful NLP tools such as fastText.  This book is your ideal introduction to fastText. You will learn how to create fastText models from the command line, without the need for complicated code. You will explore the algorithms that fastText is built on and how to use them for word representation and text classification.  Next, you will use fastText in conjunction with other popular libraries and frameworks such as Keras, TensorFlow, and PyTorch.  Finally, you will deploy fastText models to mobile devices. By the end of this book, you will have all the required knowledge to use fastText in your own applications at work or in projects.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
First Steps
4
The FastText Model
7
Using FastText in Your Own Models

Sentence classification

Sentence classification deals with understanding text found in natural languages and determining the classes that it may belong to. In the text classification set of problems, you will have a set of documents d that belongs to the corpus X (which contains all the documents). You will also have a set of finite classes C = {c1 , c2, ..., cn}. Classes are also called categories or labels. To train a model, you would need a classifier, which is generally a well-tested algorithm (not necessary but in this case we will be talking about a well-tested algorithm that is used in fastText) and you will need a corpus with documents and associated labeling identifying the classes that each document belongs to.

Text classification has many practical uses, such as the following:

  • Creating spam classifiers in email
  • Page ranking and indexing in search engines
  • Sentiment...