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

Understanding word vectors

The invention of word vectors (or word2vec) has been one of the most thrilling advancements in the NLP world. Those of you who are practicing NLP have definitely heard of word vectors at some point. This chapter will help you understand the underlying idea that caused the invention of word2vec, what word vectors look like, and how to use them in NLP applications.

The statistical world works with numbers, and all statistical methods, including statistical NLP algorithms, work with vectors. As a result, while working with statistical methods, we need to represent every real-world quantity as a vector, including text. In this section, we will learn about the different ways we can represent text as vectors and discover how word vectors provide semantic representation for words.

We will start by discovering text vectorization by covering the simplest implementation possible: one-hot encoding.

One-hot encoding

One-hot encoding is a simple and straightforward...