Modeling for NLP

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field operating at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, and AI. Its primary focus is algorithms to process and analyze large amounts of natural language data. Over the last few years, it has become an increasingly popular topic of Kaggle competitions. While the domain itself is very broad and encompasses very popular topics such as chatbots and machine translation, in this chapter we will focus on specific subsets that Kaggle contests frequently deal with.

Sentiment analysis as a simple classification problem is extremely popular and discussed all over, so we’ll begin with a somewhat more interesting variation on the problem: identifying sentiment-supporting phrases in a tweet. We’ll proceed to describe an example solution to the problem of open domain question answering and conclude with a section on augmentation for NLP problems, which is a topic that receives significantly less attention than...