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)

Summary

This chapter focused on text clustering, intending to segregate samples with distinct characteristics and assign them to different groups. Clustering is one of the most important areas in data science simply because most datasets come unlabeled. Here, we tried to provide a good overview of the topic, but in reality, we only scratched the tip of this gigantic iceberg.

In this context, we presented both hard and soft clustering methods to categorize speech-to-text transcriptions. Specifically, speech recognition, often coupled with the techniques presented in this book, provides a convenient way to gather text data. Finally, we presented methods that allow the automatic configuration of the clustering algorithms, along with metrics, to assess their performance.

We have finally reached the end of the book! But stay tuned, as much more excitement is waiting for the years to come!