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

Chapter 5: Working with Word Vectors and Semantic Similarity

Word vectors are handy tools and have been the hot topic of NLP for almost a decade. A word vector is basically a dense representation of a word. What's surprising about these vectors is that semantically similar words have similar word vectors. Word vectors are great for semantic similarity applications, such as calculating the similarity between words, phrases, sentences, and documents. At a word level, word vectors provide information about synonymity, semantic analogies, and more. We can build semantic similarity applications by using word vectors.

Word vectors are produced by algorithms that make use of the fact that similar words appear in similar contexts. To capture the meaning of a word, a word vector algorithm collects information about the surrounding words that the target word appears with. This paradigm of capturing semantics for words by their surrounding words is called distributional semantics.

...