Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing

This book attempts to simplify and present the concepts of deep learning in a very comprehensive manner, with suitable, full-fledged examples of neural network architectures, such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Sequence to Sequence (seq2seq), for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The book tries to bridge the gap between the theoretical and the applicable. It proceeds from the theoretical to the practical in a progressive manner, first by presenting the fundamentals, followed by the underlying mathematics, and, finally, the implementation of relevant examples. The first three chapters cover the basics of NLP, starting with the most frequently used Python libraries, word vector representation, and then advanced algorithms like neural networks for textual data. The last two chapters focus entirely on implementation, dealing with sophisticated architectures like RNN, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Networks, Seq2seq, etc., using the widely used Python tools TensorFlow and Keras. We have tried our best to follow a progressive approach, combining all the knowledge gathered to move on to building a question- and-answer system. The book offers a good starting point for people who want to get started in deep learning, with a focus on NLP. All the code presented in the book is available on GitHub, in the form of IPython notebooks and scripts, which allows readers to try out these examples and extend them in interesting, personal ways.