Real Python Podcast Episode #119 Title Artwork

Episode 119: Natural Language Processing and How ML Models Understand Text

The Real Python Podcast

Jul 29, 2022 58m

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How do you process and classify text documents in Python? What are the fundamental techniques and building blocks for Natural Language Processing (NLP)? This week on the show, Jodie Burchell, developer advocate for data science at JetBrains, talks about how machine learning (ML) models understand text.

Episode Sponsor:

Jodie explains how ML models require data in a structured format, which involves transforming text documents into columns and rows. She covers the most straightforward approach, called binary vectorization. We discuss the bag-of-words method and the tools of stemming, lemmatization, and count vectorization.

We jump into word embedding models next. Jodie talks about WordNet, Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), word2vec, and Gensim. Our conversation lays a foundation for starting with text classification, implementing sentiment analysis, and building projects using these tools. Jodie also shares multiple resources to help you continue exploring NLP and modeling.

Course Spotlight: Learn Text Classification With Python and Keras

In this course, you’ll learn about Python text classification with Keras, working your way from a bag-of-words model with logistic regression to more advanced methods, such as convolutional neural networks. You’ll see how you can use pretrained word embeddings, and you’ll squeeze more performance out of your model through hyperparameter optimization.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:02:47 – Exploring the topic
00:06:00 – Perceived sentience of LaMDA
00:10:24 – How do we get started?
00:11:16 – What are classification and sentiment analysis?
00:13:03 – Transforming text in rows and columns
00:14:47 – Sponsor: Snyk
00:15:27 – Bag-of-words approach
00:19:12 – Stemming and lemmatization
00:22:05 – Capturing N-grams
00:25:34 – Count vectorization
00:27:14 – Stop words
00:28:46 – Text Frequency / Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) vectorization
00:32:28 – Potential projects for bag-of-words techniques
00:34:07 – Video Course Spotlight
00:35:20 – WordNet and NLTK package
00:37:27 – Word embeddings and word2vec
00:45:30 – Previous training and too many dimensions
00:50:07 – How to use word2vec and Gensim?
00:51:26 – What types of projects for word2vec and Gensim?
00:54:41 – Getting into GPT and BERT in another episode
00:56:11 – How to follow Jodie’s work?
00:57:36 – Thanks and goodbye

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