Book Image

Natural Language Processing Fundamentals

By : Sohom Ghosh, Dwight Gunning
Book Image

Natural Language Processing Fundamentals

By: Sohom Ghosh, Dwight Gunning

Overview of this book

If NLP hasn't been your forte, Natural Language Processing Fundamentals will make sure you set off to a steady start. This comprehensive guide will show you how to effectively use Python libraries and NLP concepts to solve various problems. You'll be introduced to natural language processing and its applications through examples and exercises. This will be followed by an introduction to the initial stages of solving a problem, which includes problem definition, getting text data, and preparing it for modeling. With exposure to concepts like advanced natural language processing algorithms and visualization techniques, you'll learn how to create applications that can extract information from unstructured data and present it as impactful visuals. Although you will continue to learn NLP-based techniques, the focus will gradually shift to developing useful applications. In these sections, you'll understand how to apply NLP techniques to answer questions as can be used in chatbots. By the end of this book, you'll be able to accomplish a varied range of assignments ranging from identifying the most suitable type of NLP task for solving a problem to using a tool like spacy or gensim for performing sentiment analysis. The book will easily equip you with the knowledge you need to build applications that interpret human language.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Vector Definition

There are various mathematical representations, such as scalars, vectors, matrices, and tensors. A scalar can be considered as a number, a decimal, or even a fraction. A matrix can be considered as a rectangular array of numbers. A vector is a collection of numbers that represent some real objects. You can think of a vector as a row in a matrix. A tensor is a general concept that can be comprised of scalars, vectors, and matrices.

The following diagram shows how scalars, vectors, matrices, and tensors are different from each other:

Figure 7.1: Scalars, vectors, matrices, and tensors
Figure 7.1: Scalars, vectors, matrices, and tensors

Now, try to think about text as follows::

  • A letter that is a single unit of an alphabet
  • A word that is a series of letters
  • A sentence that is a series or words
  • A paragraph that is a sequence of words
  • A document that is a collection of words, possibly broken down into paragraphs

Each of the preceding units are in text format...