Natural Language Processing
in Data Science
Natural Language Processing in Data
Science
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence that
focuses on the interaction between computers and human language. It enables
machines to read, understand, and derive meaning from human languages in a
valuable way.
Fundamentals of NLP
Text Preprocessing
Before analyzing text data, several preprocessing steps are typically
performed:
Tokenization: Breaking text into words, phrases, symbols, or other
meaningful elements.
Stemming: Reducing words to their word stem or root form.
Lemmatization: Similar to stemming but considers the context and converts
the word to its meaningful base form.
Stop Word Removal: Eliminating common words that add little meaning
(e.g., "the", "is", "at").
Part-of-Speech Tagging: Identifying parts of speech for each word (noun,
verb, adjective, etc.).
import nltk
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer, WordNetLemmatizer
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
# Download necessary NLTK data
nltk.download('punkt')
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nltk.download('wordnet')
nltk.download('stopwords')
# Sample text
text = "Natural language processing helps computers understand, interpret, an
# Tokenization
tokens = word_tokenize(text)
print("Tokens:", tokens)
# Stemming
stemmer = PorterStemmer()
stemmed = [stemmer.stem(word) for word in tokens]
print("Stemmed:", stemmed)
# Lemmatization
lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()
lemmatized = [lemmatizer.lemmatize(word) for word in tokens]
print("Lemmatized:", lemmatized)
# Stop word removal
stop_words = set(stopwords.words('english'))
filtered = [word for word in tokens if word.lower() not in stop_words]
print("After stop word removal:", filtered)
Text Representation
Converting text into numerical representations for machine learning algorithms:
Bag of Words (BoW): Represents text as the bag (multiset) of its words,
disregarding grammar and word order.
TF-IDF: Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency measures how
important a word is to a document in a collection.
Word Embeddings: Dense vector representations of words that capture
semantic meaning.
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import CountVectorizer, TfidfVectorizer
import numpy as np
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import pandas as pd
# Sample documents
documents = [
"Natural language processing is fascinating.",
"Machine learning models can process natural language.",
"Data science involves both statistics and programming."
]
# Bag of Words
bow_vectorizer = CountVectorizer()
bow_matrix = bow_vectorizer.fit_transform(documents)
bow_df = pd.DataFrame(bow_matrix.toarray(),
columns=bow_vectorizer.get_feature_names_out())
print("Bag of Words:\n", bow_df)
# TF-IDF
tfidf_vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer()
tfidf_matrix = tfidf_vectorizer.fit_transform(documents)
tfidf_df = pd.DataFrame(tfidf_matrix.toarray(),
columns=tfidf_vectorizer.get_feature_names_out())
print("\nTF-IDF:\n", tfidf_df)
Advanced NLP Techniques
Topic Modeling
Discovering abstract topics in a collection of documents.
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA): A generative statistical model that allows
sets of observations to be explained by unobserved groups.
Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF): Factorizing the matrix of word
counts into two matrices with non-negative values.
from sklearn.decomposition import LatentDirichletAllocation, NMF
# Using the TF-IDF matrix from previous example
# LDA
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lda_model = LatentDirichletAllocation(n_components=2, random_state=42)
lda_topics = lda_model.fit_transform(bow_matrix)
# Print top words per topic
feature_names = bow_vectorizer.get_feature_names_out()
for topic_idx, topic in enumerate(lda_model.components_):
top_words_idx = topic.argsort()[:-5-1:-1]
top_words = [feature_names[i] for i in top_words_idx]
print(f"Topic {topic_idx}: {' '.join(top_words)}")
Sentiment Analysis
Determining the emotional tone behind a body of text.
from nltk.sentiment import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer
# Download VADER lexicon
nltk.download('vader_lexicon')
# Initialize sentiment analyzer
sia = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()
# Sample texts
texts = [
"I love this product! It's amazing and works perfectly.",
"This product is terrible. It broke after one use.",
"The product is okay. Nothing special but it works."
]
# Analyze sentiment
for text in texts:
sentiment = sia.polarity_scores(text)
print(f"Text: '{text}'")
print(f"Sentiment: {sentiment}")
# Determine overall sentiment
compound = sentiment['compound']
if compound >= 0.05:
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overall = "Positive"
elif compound <= -0.05:
overall = "Negative"
else:
overall = "Neutral"
print(f"Overall sentiment: {overall}\n")
Named Entity Recognition (NER)
Identifying and classifying named entities in text into predefined categories like
person names, organizations, locations, etc.
import spacy
# Load SpaCy model
nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
# Sample text
text = "Apple Inc. was founded by Steve Jobs in Cupertino, California in 1976."
# Process text
doc = nlp(text)
# Extract entities
for entity in doc.ents:
print(f"{entity.text}: {entity.label_}")
Deep Learning for NLP
Modern NLP applications often use deep learning techniques.
Transformers and BERT
Transformers are a type of neural network architecture that have revolutionized
NLP. BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a
transformer-based model that has achieved state-of-the-art results on many
NLP tasks.
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from transformers import pipeline
# Load pre-trained sentiment analysis model
classifier = pipeline('sentiment-analysis')
# Analyze text
result = classifier("I've been waiting for this movie for so long and it was abso
print(result)
# Question answering
qa_pipeline = pipeline('question-answering')
context = "The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de M
result = qa_pipeline(question="Who designed the Eiffel Tower?", context=cont
print(result)
Word Embeddings
Word embeddings represent words as dense vectors in a continuous vector
space where semantically similar words are mapped to nearby points.
Word2Vec: Creates word embeddings by predicting words given their
context or vice versa.
GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation captures global statistics of
word-word co-occurrence.
FastText: Extension of Word2Vec that represents each word as an n-gram
of characters.
from gensim.models import Word2Vec
# Sample sentences
sentences = [
["natural", "language", "processing", "is", "fascinating"],
["machine", "learning", "models", "can", "process", "natural", "language"],
["data", "science", "involves", "statistics", "and", "programming"]
]
# Train Word2Vec model
model = Word2Vec(sentences, vector_size=100, window=5, min_count=1, wor
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# Find similar words
similar_words = model.wv.most_similar("natural", topn=3)
print("Words similar to 'natural':", similar_words)
# Vector for a word
vector = model.wv["language"]
print("Vector for 'language':", vector[:5]) # Show first 5 dimensions
NLP Applications in Data Science
Text Classification: Categorizing text documents into predefined classes.
Machine Translation: Automatically translating text from one language to
another.
Chatbots and Virtual Assistants: Building conversational agents
Text Summarization: Generating concise summaries of longer documents.
Information Extraction: Extracting structured information from unstructured
text.
Challenges in NLP
Ambiguity: Words and phrases can have multiple meanings.
Context Dependency: Meaning often depends on surrounding text.
Language Evolution: New words and usage patterns emerge over time.
Multilingual Processing: Handling different languages with different
structures.
Sarcasm and Irony: Detecting non-literal language use.
NLP continues to evolve rapidly with advancements in deep learning and
increased computational power. Understanding the basics of text
preprocessing, representation, and advanced techniques allows data
scientists to extract valuable insights from textual data.
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