Book Image

Mastering spaCy

By : Duygu Altınok
Book Image

Mastering spaCy

By: Duygu Altınok

Overview of this book

spaCy is an industrial-grade, efficient NLP Python library. It offers various pre-trained models and ready-to-use features. Mastering spaCy provides you with end-to-end coverage of spaCy's features and real-world applications. You'll begin by installing spaCy and downloading models, before progressing to spaCy's features and prototyping real-world NLP apps. Next, you'll get familiar with visualizing with spaCy's popular visualizer displaCy. The book also equips you with practical illustrations for pattern matching and helps you advance into the world of semantics with word vectors. Statistical information extraction methods are also explained in detail. Later, you'll cover an interactive business case study that shows you how to combine all spaCy features for creating a real-world NLP pipeline. You'll implement ML models such as sentiment analysis, intent recognition, and context resolution. The book further focuses on classification with popular frameworks such as TensorFlow's Keras API together with spaCy. You'll cover popular topics, including intent classification and sentiment analysis, and use them on popular datasets and interpret the classification results. By the end of this book, you'll be able to confidently use spaCy, including its linguistic features, word vectors, and classifiers, to create your own NLP apps.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with spaCy
4
Section 2: spaCy Features
9
Section 3: Machine Learning with spaCy

Getting started with data preparation

In the previous chapters, we saw how to make the best of spaCy's pre-trained statistical models (including the POS tagger, NER, and dependency parser) in our applications. In this chapter, we will see how to customize the statistical models for our custom domain and data.

spaCy models are very successful for general NLP purposes, such as understanding a sentence's syntax, splitting a paragraph into sentences, and extracting some entities. However, sometimes, we work on very specific domains that spaCy models didn't see during training.

For example, the Twitter text contains many non-regular words, such as hashtags, emoticons, and mentions. Also, Twitter sentences are usually just phrases, not full sentences. Here, it's entirely reasonable that spaCy's POS tagger performs in a substandard manner as the POS tagger is trained on full, grammatically correct English sentences.

Another example is the medical domain...