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 followed the path established in the previous chapter, further focusing on more advanced techniques for solving the topic classification problem.

Specifically, we saw how to extend the exploratory data analysis phase using different plot types to help make informed decisions. In this context, we had the opportunity to learn algorithms for dimensionality reduction, either for visualization or feature selection.

Then, we incorporated two supervised ML algorithms and introduced a novel representation of the text data based on word embedding. This representation was put into operation using our custom classifiers and an open source tool. The next chapter deals with another typical problem in NLP: how to perform sentiment analysis on a text corpus.