Why are we learning about NLP in a network book?
I briefly answered this question in the introduction of the first chapter, but it is worth repeating in more detail. Many people who work on text analysis are aware of sentiment analysis and text classification. Text classification is the ability to predict whether a piece of text can be classified as something. For example, let’s take this string:
“How are you doing today?”
What can we tell about this string? Is it a question or a statement? It’s a question. Who is being asked this question? You are. Is there a positive, negative, or neutral emotion tied to the question? It looks neutral to me. Let’s try another string.
“Jack and Jill went up the hill, but Jack fell down because he is an idiot.”
This is a statement about Jack and Jill, and Jack is being called an idiot, which is not a very nice thing to say. However, it seems like the insult was written jokingly, so it is...