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

Intent recognition

Intent recognition (also called intent classification) is the task of classifying user utterances with predefined labels (intents). Intent classification is basically text classification. Intent classification is a well-known and common NLP task. GitHub and Kaggle host many intent classification datasets (please refer to the References section for the names of some example datasets).

In real-world chatbot applications, we first determine the domain our chatbot has to function in, such as finance and banking, healthcare, marketing, and so on. Then we perform the following loop of actions:

  1. We determine a set of intents we want to support and prepare a labeled dataset of (utterance, label) pairs. We train our intent classifier on this dataset.
  2. Next, we deploy our chatbot to the users and gather real user data.
  3. Then we examine how our chatbot performed on real user data. At this stage, usually, we spot some new intents and some utterances our chatbot...