Book Image

Advanced Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow 2

By : Ashish Bansal, Tony Mullen
Book Image

Advanced Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow 2

By: Ashish Bansal, Tony Mullen

Overview of this book

Recently, there have been tremendous advances in NLP, and we are now moving from research labs into practical applications. This book comes with a perfect blend of both the theoretical and practical aspects of trending and complex NLP techniques. The book is focused on innovative applications in the field of NLP, language generation, and dialogue systems. It helps you apply the concepts of pre-processing text using techniques such as tokenization, parts of speech tagging, and lemmatization using popular libraries such as Stanford NLP and SpaCy. You will build Named Entity Recognition (NER) from scratch using Conditional Random Fields and Viterbi Decoding on top of RNNs. The book covers key emerging areas such as generating text for use in sentence completion and text summarization, bridging images and text by generating captions for images, and managing dialogue aspects of chatbots. You will learn how to apply transfer learning and fine-tuning using TensorFlow 2. Further, it covers practical techniques that can simplify the labelling of textual data. The book also has a working code that is adaptable to your use cases for each tech piece. By the end of the book, you will have an advanced knowledge of the tools, techniques and deep learning architecture used to solve complex NLP problems.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
11
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12
Index

Named Entity Recognition (NER) with BiLSTMs, CRFs, and Viterbi Decoding

One of the fundamental building blocks of NLU is Named Entity Recognition (NER). The names of people, companies, products, and quantities can be tagged in a piece of text with NER, which is very useful in chatbot applications and many other use cases in information retrieval and extraction. NER will be the main focus of this chapter. Building and training a model capable of doing NER requires several techniques, such as Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and Bi-directional LSTMs (BiLSTMs). Advanced TensorFlow techniques like custom layers, losses, and training loops are also used. We will build on the knowledge of BiLSTMs gained from the previous chapter. Specifically, the following will be covered:

  • Overview of NER
  • Building an NER tagging model with BiLSTM
  • CRFs and Viterbi algorithms
  • Building a custom Keras layer for CRFs
  • Building a custom loss function in Keras and...