Implementing our first neural network

Great! Now that you’ve learned the architecture and foundations of TensorFlow, it’s high time that we move on and implement something slightly more complex. Let’s implement a neural network. Specifically, we will implement a fully connected neural network model (FCNN), which we discussed in Chapter 1, Introduction to Natural Language Processing.

One of the stepping stones to the introduction of neural networks is to implement a neural network that is able to classify digits. For this task, we will be using the famous MNIST dataset made available at http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/.

You might feel a bit skeptical regarding our using a computer vision task rather than an NLP task. However, vision tasks can be implemented with less preprocessing and are easy to understand.

As this is our first encounter with neural networks, we will see how to implement this model using Keras. Keras is the high-level submodule that...