implementing a perceptron classifier

Question

Hi I\'m pretty new to Python and to NLP. I need to implement a perceptron classifier. I searched through some websites but didn\'t find enough information. For now I have a numb

Answer 1

I think that trying to solve an NLP problem with a Neural Network when you're not familiar with either might be a step too far. That you're doing it in a new language is the least of your worries.

I'll link you to my Neural Computation module slides that gets taught at my university. You'll want the slides from session 1 and session 2 in week 2. Right at the bottom of the page is a link to how to implement a neural network in C. With a few modifications should be able to port it to python. You should note that it details how to implement a multilayer perceptron. You only need to implement a single layer perceptron, so ignore anything that talks about hidden layers.

A quick explanation of x and w. Both x and w are vectors. x is the input vector. x contains normalised frequencies for each word you are concerned about. w contains weights for each word you are concerned with. The perceptron works by multiplying the input frequency for each word by its respective weight and summing them up. It passes the result to a function (typically a sigmoid function) that turns the result into a value between 0 and 1. 1 means the perceptron is positive that the inputs are an instance of the class it represents and 0 means it is sure that the inputs really aren't an example of its class.

With NLP you typically learn about the bag of words model first, before moving on to other, more complex, models. With a neural network, hopefully, it will learn its own model. The problem with this is that the neural network will not give you much of an understanding of NLP, other than documents can be classified by the words they contain, and that usually the number and type of words in a document contains most of the information you need to classify a document -- context and grammar do not add much extra detail.

Anyway, I hope that gives a better place from which to start your project. If you're still stuck on a particular part then ask again and I'll do my best to help.