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)

Understanding machine translation

A serious impediment to spreading new information, ideas, and knowledge is the language barriers imposed by the different languages spoken worldwide. Despite the cultural richness brought to our global heritage, they can pose significant hurdles to efficient human communication. This chapter focuses on machine translation (MT), which aims to alleviate these barriers. MT is the process of automatically converting a piece of text from a source into a target language without human intervention. This task is more than a modest goal and demands the synergy of various emerging fields to address the peculiarities of human language. For instance, with their inherent ambiguity and flexibility, you can expect multiple situations where more than one best translation exists. Despite many prominent MT systems appearing in recent years, the technology is not new. In the 50s, it was part of the first computing applications. Nevertheless, significant progress has...