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 dealt with text summarization, yet another hot topic in NLP. Systems of this kind aim to reduce the information load imposed by the overabundance of online text data. We used various extractive and abstractive text summarization techniques to deliver accurate summaries.

The first part of the chapter focused on web crawling and scraping, where you became acquainted with the basic concepts, the relevant technologies, and how to implement web spiders in Python. The provided coding examples constitute a sufficient guide to implementing your web crawlers for different tasks.

Next, we discussed various topics that led to the comprehension of the transformer model. For example, we debated why having a single context vector between the encoder and the decoder is a bottleneck. We also discussed attention mechanisms that enhance some parts of the input data while diminishing others. Finally, utilizing a corpus of Wikipedia pages, we created a dataset and trained the...