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)

Introducing the random forest algorithm

The method discussed in this section is based on the concept of ensemble learning, where multiple models (in our case, classifiers) are generated and combined to solve a particular problem. You can think of ensemble learning as having diverse people who bring different perspectives to the table for a decision. Ultimately, you want to harness those different perspectives and ensure a joint decision is reached.

A real-world example should shed some light on this type of learning. Suppose that you visit a city for the first time. After an exhausting day, there is finally some free time for dinner. One possible strategy in front of many dining choices is to walk around the city to find a good restaurant, a bistro, or a takeaway. Wandering around, the aim is to make the best possible choice for dinner based on several criteria (as in features), such as the quality of service, the ambience, and menu prices. Essentially, your brain runs a classification...