Introducing Machine Learning for Text

The language phenomenon is still shrouded in mystery despite the recent achievements in various scientific disciplines in terms of understanding how and why it works. Yet, surprisingly, homo sapiens are the only species to develop this complex medium for exchanging information, which has led to the most striking accomplishments of humankind. Although the oral and gestural forms of language were the driving forces over millennia, their written counterpart decisively spread knowledge worldwide. Inspired by the expressive power of human texts, this introductory chapter sets the scene for the discussion in the following chapters, where we examine how to teach machines to extract meaningful interpretations from text corpora.

Building machines that learn from observations is becoming the dominant paradigm due to the ever-increasing amount of data that cannot be processed using traditional methods. For instance, text data is produced in vast quantities...