Book Image

Machine Learning Techniques for Text

By : Nikos Tsourakis
5 (1)
Book Image

Machine Learning Techniques for Text

5 (1)
By: Nikos Tsourakis

Overview of this book

With the ever-increasing demand for machine learning and programming professionals, it's prime time to invest in the field. This book will help you in this endeavor, focusing specifically on text data and human language by steering a middle path among the various textbooks that present complicated theoretical concepts or focus disproportionately on Python code. A good metaphor this work builds upon is the relationship between an experienced craftsperson and their trainee. Based on the current problem, the former picks a tool from the toolbox, explains its utility, and puts it into action. This approach will help you to identify at least one practical use for each method or technique presented. The content unfolds in ten chapters, each discussing one specific case study. For this reason, the book is solution-oriented. It's accompanied by Python code in the form of Jupyter notebooks to help you obtain hands-on experience. A recurring pattern in the chapters of this book is helping you get some intuition on the data and then implement and contrast various solutions. By the end of this book, you'll be able to understand and apply various techniques with Python for text preprocessing, text representation, dimensionality reduction, machine learning, language modeling, visualization, and evaluation.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

The era of AI

At the end of the first section of this chapter, we mentioned that we are interested in teaching machines to act intelligently. This task entails the simulation of human intelligence in machines to make them think and act like real humans, but, of course, this is far more than a modest goal. Even from the creation of the first computers in the 1940s, the expectation was that machines would match humans in general intelligence. Back then, there was a great degree of optimism that this could happen in the foreseeable future. These great expectations paved the way for an emerging field called artificial intelligence (AI) that has faced several hype and investment cycles ever since, followed by periods of disappointment in the mid-70s and mid-90s. The great promise of AI has been recorded in myriad science fiction novels and movies. Since then, the high expectations inspired by this vision have not been fully met. Also, the term intelligent is still controversial due to whether...