Introduction

The previous chapters laid a firm foundation for NLP. But now we will go deeper into a key topic—one that gives us surprising insights into how language processing works and how some of the key advances in human-computer interaction are facilitated. At the heart of NLP is the simple trick of representing text as numbers. This helps software algorithms perform the sophisticated computations that are required to understand the meaning of the text.

As we have already discussed in previous chapters, most machine learning algorithms take numeric data as input and do not understand the text as such. We need to represent our text in numeric form so that we can apply different machine learning algorithms and other NLP techniques to it. These numeric representations are called vectors and are also sometimes called word embeddings or simply embeddings.

This chapter begins with a discussion of vectors, how text can be represented as vectors, and how vectors can be composed...