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)

Teaching Machines to Translate

The universal translator is a prominent yet imaginary device commonly encountered in many science fiction novels, films, and TV series. Star Trek, for example, long ago included the device in its screenplay to accommodate the unhindered translation of alien languages into the native language of the user. But unfortunately, a Star Trek-like device doesn’t exist yet, and the vision of a universal translator has not been realized. This shortcoming comes as no surprise, given human languages’ fluidity, inherent ambiguity, and flexibility. Nevertheless, the effort to teach machines to work as efficient translators is constant, with fascinating results in recent years.

This chapter seeks to present the different methods for machine translation and, at the same time, enhance your skillset with many standard techniques for NLP. The differences in the methods presented are an excellent opportunity to contrast the design philosophy of top-down...