Ashish Bansal - Advanced Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow 2

Advanced Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow 2

Build effective real-world NLP applications using NER, RNNs, seq2seq models, Transformers, and more

Ashish Bansal

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Advanced Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow 2

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First published: February 2021

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Ashish Bansal is the Director of Recommendations at Twitch, where he works on building scalable recommendation systems across a variety of product surfaces, connecting content to people. He has worked on recommendations systems at multiple organizations, most notably Twitter, where he led Trends and Events recommendations, and at Capital One, where he worked on B2B and B2C products. Ashish was also a co-founder of GALE Partners, a full-service digital agency in Toronto, and spent over 9 years at SapientNitro, a leading digital agency.

In many years of work building hybrid recommendation systems balancing collaborative filtering signals with content-based signals, he has spent a lot of time building NLP systems for extracting content signals. In digital marketing, he built systems to analyze coupons, offers, and subject lines. He has worked on messages, tweets, and news articles among other types of textual data and applying cutting edge NLP techniques.

He has over 20 years of experience, with over a decade building ML and Deep Learning systems. Ashish is a guest lecturer at IIT BHU teaching Applied Deep Learning. He has a bachelor's in technology from IIT BHU, and an MBA in marketing from Kellogg School of Management.

My father, Prof. B. B. Bansal, said that the best way to test understanding of a subject is to explain it to someone else. This book is dedicated to him, and my Gurus my mother, my sister, who instilled the love of reading, and my wife, who taught me consider all perspectives. I would like to mention Aditya sir, who instilled the value of hard work, which was invaluable in writing this book while balancing a full-time job and family. I would like to mention Ajeet, my manager at Twitter, and Omar, my manager at Twitch, for their support during the writing of this book. Ashish Agrawal and Subroto Chakravorty helped me tide over issues in code.

I would like to thank the technical reviewers for ensuring the quality of the book and the editors for working tirelessly on the book. Tushar Gupta, my acquisitions editor, was instrumental in managing the various challenges along the way. Alex your encouraging comments kept my morale high!

Tony Mullen is an Associate Teaching Professor at The Khoury College of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Seattle. He has been involved in language technology for over 20 years and holds a master's degree in Linguistics from Trinity College, Dublin, and a PhD in natural language processing from the University of Groningen. He has published papers in the fields of sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, computer-assisted language learning, and ontology development, among others. Recently, in addition to teaching and supervising graduate computer science, he has been involved in NLP research in the medical domain and consulted for a startup in language technology.

Kumar Shridhar is an NLP researcher at ETH Zrich and founder of NeuralSpace. He believes that an NLP system should comprehend texts as humans do. He is working towards the design of flexible NLP systems making them more robust and interpretable. He also believes that NLP systems should not be restricted to few languages, and with NeuralSpace he is extending NLP capabilities to low-resource languages.