Natural Language Processing Basics

Unstructured text is one of the main sources of data in many social media platforms as well as many other applications like electronic health records. In this month's session, we are going to be given a gentle introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) by a local NLP Engineer, Michael Capizzi.

Abstract:

In this talk, I will explain the main approaches to encoding natural language in such a way that it can be leveraged by machine learning techniques. We will focus this session specifically on the encoding of individual words into vector space, spending most of our time exploring the motivations behind, approaches of, and values of word embeddings (the most famous of which is "word2vec").

We will look at a few of the python packages that are used in NLP through a jupyter (formerly known as iPython) notebook, so feel free to bring your laptop along.

Speaker Bio:
Michael Capizzi comes to Data Science as a second career. A high school English teacher for over 10 years, he has recently graduated with a Masters in Human Language Technology from the University of Arizona and now works as a Natural Language Processing Engineer at Nextiva in Scottsdale. His responsibilities range from building and evaluating classification models to building an automatic speech recognition system for voice mail transcription and keyword search. His general interests are how to harness the complexities of language so they can be leveraged as "data".

Agenda:
• 6:30-6:45pm: Sign-in & network (with Food & Beverages from Rubios Catering sponsored by IT Partners)
• 6:45-7:00pm: Introduction & announcements
• 7:00-8:15pm: Presentation by Michael Capizzi
• 8:15-8:30pm: Q&A & wrap-up

Sponsor:
We appreciate Richard Cook from IT Partners (http://www.goitpartners.com/) for sponsoring food and refreshments for this event.

Parking Options:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/secure.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/e/8/0/d/600_440279405.jpeg

• Free covered parking - after 5:30 PM!! Address is 1551 S. Rural Rd., Tempe, AZ (https://www.google.com/maps?q=1551+S.+Rural+Rd.,+Tempe,+AZ)