Bengio

Financial Times Best Books of the Year 2018

Financial Times Best Books of the Year 2018

Can machine learning deliver AI? Theoretical results, inspiration from the brain and cognition, as well as machine learning experiments suggest that in order to learn the kind of complicated functions that can represent high-level abstractions (e.g. in vision, language, and other AI-level tasks), one would need deep architectures. Deep architectures are composed of multiple levels of non-linear operations, such as in neural nets with many hidden layers, graphical models with many levels of latent variables, or in complicated propositional formulae re-using many sub-formulae.

This book offers an introduction to modern natural language processing using machine learning, focusing on how neural networks create a machine interpretable representation of the meaning of natural language. Language is crucially linked to ideas – as Webster’s 1923 “English Composition and Literature” puts it: “A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought”. Thus the representation of sentences and the words that make them up is vital in advancing artificial intelligence and other “smart” systems currently being developed. Providing an overview of the research in the area, from Bengio et al.’s seminal work on a “Neural Probabilistic Language Model” in 2003, to the latest techniques, this book enables readers to gain an understanding of how the techniques are related and what is best for their purposes.