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

What is POS tagging?

We saw the terms POS tag and POS tagging briefly in the previous chapter, while discussing the spaCy Token class features. As is obvious from the name, they refer to the process of tagging tokens with POS tags. One question remains here: What is a POS tag? In this section, we'll discover in detail the concept of POS and how to make the most of it in our NLP applications.

The POS tagging acronym expands as part-of-speech tagging. A part of speech is a syntactic category in which every word falls into a category according to its function in a sentence. For example, English has nine main categories: verb, noun, pronoun, determiner, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. We can describe the functions of each category as follows:

  • Verb: Expresses an action or a state of being
  • Noun: Identifies a person, a place, or a thing, or names a particular of one of these (a proper noun)
  • Pronoun: Can replace a noun or noun phrase
  • ...