Text classification is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that involves categorizing text into predefined classes. This tutorial will guide you through building a text classification model using Python and popular machine learning libraries.
🚀 Steps to Build a Text Classification Model
Data Preparation
- Collect a labeled dataset (e.g., movie reviews, spam detection)
- Preprocess text: tokenization, stopword removal, stemming
- Convert text to numerical features using techniques like TF-IDF or word embeddings
Model Selection
- Choose between traditional ML models (e.g., Naive Bayes, SVM) or deep learning approaches (e.g., RNN, Transformers)
- For NLP tasks, BERT and other pre-trained models are highly effective
Training & Evaluation
- Split data into training/validation/test sets
- Train your model and evaluate performance using metrics like accuracy, F1-score
- Fine-tune hyperparameters for better results
Deployment
- Save trained model using
joblib
orpickle
- Create a simple API endpoint with Flask/Django for real-time predictions
- Save trained model using
📚 Recommended Learning Path
For deeper understanding of NLP concepts:
Explore NLP Fundamentals
🧪 Example Code Snippet
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
from sklearn.naive_bayes import MultinomialNB
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline
text_clf = Pipeline([
('tfidf', TfidfVectorizer()),
('clf', MultinomialNB())
])
text_clf.fit(training_data, training_labels)