Book Image

Mastering spaCy

By : Duygu Altınok
Book Image

Mastering spaCy

By: Duygu Altınok

Overview of this book

spaCy is an industrial-grade, efficient NLP Python library. It offers various pre-trained models and ready-to-use features. Mastering spaCy provides you with end-to-end coverage of spaCy's features and real-world applications. You'll begin by installing spaCy and downloading models, before progressing to spaCy's features and prototyping real-world NLP apps. Next, you'll get familiar with visualizing with spaCy's popular visualizer displaCy. The book also equips you with practical illustrations for pattern matching and helps you advance into the world of semantics with word vectors. Statistical information extraction methods are also explained in detail. Later, you'll cover an interactive business case study that shows you how to combine all spaCy features for creating a real-world NLP pipeline. You'll implement ML models such as sentiment analysis, intent recognition, and context resolution. The book further focuses on classification with popular frameworks such as TensorFlow's Keras API together with spaCy. You'll cover popular topics, including intent classification and sentiment analysis, and use them on popular datasets and interpret the classification results. By the end of this book, you'll be able to confidently use spaCy, including its linguistic features, word vectors, and classifiers, to create your own NLP apps.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with spaCy
4
Section 2: spaCy Features
9
Section 3: Machine Learning with spaCy

Training a pipeline component from scratch

In the previous section, we saw how to update the existing NER component according to our data. In this section, we will create a brand-new NER component for the medicine domain.

Let's start with a small dataset to understand the training procedure. Then we'll be experimenting with a real medical NLP dataset. The following sentences belong to the medicine domain and include medical entities such as drug and disease names:

Methylphenidate/DRUG is effectively used in treating children with epilepsy/DISEASE and ADHD/DISEASE.           
Patients were followed up for 6 months.
Antichlamydial/DRUG antibiotics/DRUG may be useful for curing coronary-artery/DISEASE disease/DISEASE.

The following code block shows how to train an NER component from scratch. As we mentioned before, it's better to create our own NER rather than updating spaCy's default NER model as medical entities...