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

Semantic similarity methods for semantic parsing

Natural language allows us to express the same concept in different ways and with different words. Every language has synonyms and semantically related words.

As an NLP developer, while developing a semantic parser for a chatbot application, text classification, or any other semantic application, you should keep in my mind that users use a fairly wide set of phrases and expressions for each intent. In fact, if you're building a chatbot by using a platform such as RASA (https://rasa.com/) or on a platform such as Dialogflow (https://dialogflow.cloud.google.com/), you're asked to provide as many utterance examples as you can provide for each intent. Then, these utterances are used to train the intent classifier behind the scenes.

There are usually two ways to recognize semantic similarity, either with a synonyms dictionary or with word vector-based semantic similarity methods. In this section, we will discuss both approaches...