Book Image

Hands-On Natural Language Processing with PyTorch 1.x

By : Thomas Dop
Book Image

Hands-On Natural Language Processing with PyTorch 1.x

By: Thomas Dop

Overview of this book

In the internet age, where an increasing volume of text data is generated daily from social media and other platforms, being able to make sense of that data is a crucial skill. With this book, you’ll learn how to extract valuable insights from text by building deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Starting by understanding how to install PyTorch and using CUDA to accelerate the processing speed, you’ll explore how the NLP architecture works with the help of practical examples. This PyTorch NLP book will guide you through core concepts such as word embeddings, CBOW, and tokenization in PyTorch. You’ll then learn techniques for processing textual data and see how deep learning can be used for NLP tasks. The book demonstrates how to implement deep learning and neural network architectures to build models that will allow you to classify and translate text and perform sentiment analysis. Finally, you’ll learn how to build advanced NLP models, such as conversational chatbots. By the end of this book, you’ll not only have understood the different NLP problems that can be solved using deep learning with PyTorch, but also be able to build models to solve them.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Section 1: Essentials of PyTorch 1.x for NLP
7
Section 3: Real-World NLP Applications Using PyTorch 1.x

Text preprocessing

Textual data can come in a variety of formats and styles. Text may be in a structured, readable format or in a more raw, unstructured format. Our text may contain punctuation and symbols that we don't wish to include in our models or may contain HTML and other non-textual formatting. This is of particular concern when scraping text from online sources. In order to prepare our text so that it can be input into any NLP models, we must perform preprocessing. This will clean our data so that it is in a standard format. In this section, we will illustrate some of these preprocessing steps in more detail.

Removing HTML

When scraping text from online sources, you may find that your text contains HTML markup and other non-textual artifacts. We do not generally want to include these in our NLP inputs for our models, so these should be removed by default. For example, in HTML, the <b> tag indicates that the text following it should be in bold font. However...