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

Transformers and transfer learning

A milestone in NLP happened in 2017 with the release of the research paper Attention Is All You Need, by Vaswani et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762), which introduced a brand-new machine learning idea and architecture – transformers. Transformers in NLP is a fresh idea that aims to solve sequential modeling tasks and targets some problems introduced by long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture (recall LSTM architecture from Chapter 8, Text Classification with spaCy). Here's how the paper explains how transformers work:

"The Transformer is the first transduction model relying entirely on self-attention to compute representations of its input and output without using sequence-aligned RNNs or convolution."

Transduction in this context means transforming input words to output words by transforming input words and sentences into vectors. Typically, a transformer is trained on a huge corpus such as Wiki or news. Then,...