Book Image

Machine Learning Techniques for Text

By : Nikos Tsourakis
Book Image

Machine Learning Techniques for Text

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)

Using speech-to-text

Speech-to-text, also known as speech recognition, is a forefront technology that allows the accurate conversion of speech into text in real-time or batch mode. The recent advances in machine learning have led to state-of-the-art systems that can understand natural speech in many languages. Deep neural networks have proven to be very efficient for speech recognition, and current systems have an error rate of between 3%-5%, depending on the task. As a point of reference, humans achieve similar error rates when asked to transcribe recorded audio. Deep neural networks have worked so well for the task because of the data’s compositional nature; waveforms can be cut into phonemes, which are the building blocks of words. Then, words can be combined to create sentences. We have seen a similar concept during the discussion in the Understanding CNN section of Chapter 8, Detecting Hateful and Offensive Language. Processing an image using a convolutional neural network...