Text Representations - Words to Numbers

Computers today cannot act on words or text directly. They need to be represented by meaningful number sequences. These long sequences of decimal numbers are called vectors, and this step is often referred to as the vectorization of text.

So, where are these word vectors used:

• In text classification and summarization tasks
• During similar word searches, such as synonyms
• In machine translation (for example, when translating text from English to German)
• When understanding similar texts (for example, Facebook articles)
• During question and answer sessions, and general tasks (for example, chatbots used in appointment scheduling)

Very frequently, we see word vectors used in some form of categorization task. For instance, using a machine learning or deep learning model for sentiment analysis, with the following text vectorization methods:

• TF...