Natural Language Processing in TensorFlow

The first step in understanding sentiment in text, and in particular when training a neural network to do so is the tokenization of that text. This is the process of converting the text into numeric values, with a number representing a word or a character. This week you'll learn about the Tokenizer and pad_sequences APIs in TensorFlow and how they can be used to prepare and encode text and sentences to get them ready for training neural networks!

Last week you saw how to use the Tokenizer to prepare your text to be used by a neural network by converting words into numeric tokens, and sequencing sentences from these tokens. This week you'll learn about Embeddings, where these tokens are mapped as vectors in a high dimension space. With Embeddings and labelled examples, these vectors can then be tuned so that words with similar meaning will have a similar direction in the vector space. This will begin the process of training a neural network to understand sentiment in text -- and you'll begin by looking at movie reviews, training a neural network on texts that are labelled 'positive' or 'negative' and determining which words in a sentence drive those meanings.

In the last couple of weeks you looked first at Tokenizing words to get numeric values from them, and then using Embeddings to group words of similar meaning depending on how they were labelled. This gave you a good, but rough, sentiment analysis -- words such as 'fun' and 'entertaining' might show up in a positive movie review, and 'boring' and 'dull' might show up in a negative one. But sentiment can also be determined by the sequence in which words appear. For example, you could have 'not fun', which of course is the opposite of 'fun'. This week you'll start digging into a variety of model formats that are used in training models to understand context in sequence!