Book Image

Machine Learning Techniques for Text

By : Nikos Tsourakis
5 (1)
Book Image

Machine Learning Techniques for Text

5 (1)
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 text summarization

With the burden of a busy daily schedule, we all seek to reduce the time spent reading text data. Take a moment to contemplate the number of emails, reports, news articles, tweets, blog posts, and so on you confront in 24 hours. The human brain employs different strategies to compensate for this challenge, such as skipping sentences in the text or searching for specific keywords before focusing on the content. Many studies have examined this phenomenon, and one of the most cited ones refers to how people in the west read the content of a web page. Using eye-tracking techniques, researchers from the Nielsen Norman Group (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content-discovered/) showed that humans follow a reading pattern resembling the letter F, as illustrated in Figure 7.1:

Figure 7.1 – F-shaped reading pattern of a web page

The reading usually starts at the upper part of the content area (point...