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

More spaCy features

Most of the NLP development is token and span oriented; that is, it processes tags, dependency relations, tokens themselves, and phrases. Most of the time we eliminate small words and words without much meaning; we process URLs differently, and so on. What we do sometimes depends on the token shape (token is a short word or token looks like an URL string) or more semantical features (such as the token is an article, or the token is a conjunction). In this section, we will see these features of tokens with examples. We'll start with features related to the token shape:

 doc = nlp("Hello, hi!")
 doc[0].lower_
'hello'

token.lower_ returns the token in lowercase. The return value is a Unicode string and this feature is equivalent to token.text.lower().

is_lower and is_upper are similar to their Python string method counterparts, islower() and isupper(). is_lower returns True if all the characters are lowercase, while is_upper does the...