Mastering Azure Machine Learning - Second Edition

Chapter 7: Advanced Feature Extraction with NLP

In the previous chapters, we learned about many standard transformation and preprocessing approaches within the Azure Machine Learning service as well as typical labeling techniques using the Azure Machine Learning Data Labeling service. In this chapter, we want to go one step further to extract semantic features from textual and categorical data—a problem that users often face when training ML models. This chapter will describe the foundations of feature extraction with Natural Language Processing (NLP). This will help you to practically implement semantic embeddings using NLP for your ML pipelines.

First, we will take a look at the differences between textual, categorical, nominal, and ordinal ...