Learn Babel, Natural and Tweenlite

In this course we’ll work through Natural’s API for natural language processing in JavaScript. We’ll look at how to process text: learning how to break up language strings, find the word roots, work with inflectors, find sequences of words, and tag parts of speech. We’ll learn how to find important stats about a body of text: how to compare strings, how to classify text with machine learning, how to use the tf-idf tool to find relevant words. We’ll look at some of the extra tools Natural gives us, including the dictionary/thesaurus of WordNet, a phonetics comparer that lets us see if two words sound the same, and a spellcheck feature. We’ll also look at tries and digraphs, two data structures that help us better analyze bodies of text.

Natural is a general natural language facility for nodejs. Tokenizing, stemming, classification, phonetics, tf-idf, WordNet, string similarity, and some inflections are currently supported.

natural

Natural Language Processing in JavaScript with Natural

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

Converting all of our modern JavaScript into ES5 compatible syntax is a great way to use modern features while targeting older browsers. What happens when the browsers natively support these language features? Then it no longer makes sense to transform that code or to include polyfills that will go unused. In this lesson, we’ll add the `@babel/polyfill` package and configure `babel-preset-env`

Target specific browsers with babel-preset-env and the babel pollyfill

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

We take the opengraph image we wrote in codesandbox and copy it into our serverless function. We use Rollup to compile the component into an IIFE (immediately invoked function expression) that can run in our headless browser environment and cover a wide set of rollup plugins that we need for compatibility. We end the lesson having successfully screenshot our opengraph react component from our Netlify Function

**Note**:  Due to Netlify changing their handling, the path in `fs.readFileSync` is affected. Update to:
```js
const script = fs.readFileSync(path.resolve(__dirname, "image.js"), "utf-8");
```

Compiling a React to an IIFE with Rollup to execute and render in a headless browser

We will learn about “stemming,” the process of finding the root of words, often in order to group words by a common base root. We will look at the Porter and Lancaster Stemmers, briefly touch on Natural’s support for Russian and Spanish stemmers, and introduce the function to stem and tokenize at the same time.

Find the roots of words using stemming in Natural

Inflectors are the modifiers of a word that indicate grammatical categories. While Natural’s coverage of inflectors is not comprehensive, we will show how Natural can pluralize/singularize nouns and count numbers. 

Pluralizing nouns and counting numbers with inflectors in Natural

N-grams are sequences of words, where the 'n' stands for the number of words in the sequence. In this lesson, we will see how to find bigrams (2-grams), trigrams (3-grams), and any other length n-gram in a body of text. 

Find sequences of words (n-grams) using Natural

We will learn how to compare how similar two strings are to each other, examining three algorithms: Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, and Dice’s Coefficient.  

You should note that none of these algorithms are inherently better than the others. Instead, it's important to choose the one that best fits your text data. 

Compare similarity of strings through string distance in Natural

In this lesson, we will learn how to train a Naive Bayes classifier or a Logistic Regression classifier - basic machine learning algorithms - in order to classify text into categories.

Classify text into categories with machine learning in Natural

In this lesson, we will learn how to train a Naive Bayes classifier and a Logistic Regression classifier - basic machine learning algorithms - on JSON text data, and classify it into categories.

While this dataset is still considered a small dataset -- only a couple hundred points of data -- we'll start to get better results.

The general rule is that Logistic Regression will work better than Naive Bayes, but only if there is enough data. Since this is still a pretty small dataset, Naive Bayes works better here. Generally, Logistic Regression takes longer to train as well. 

This uses data from Ana Cachopo: http://ana.cachopo.org/datasets-for-single-label-text-categorization

Classify JSON text data with machine learning in Natural

Tries are a data structure that provide an efficient way to search for the existence of a word or phrase in a body of text, or to search by prefix. 

Search more efficiently with tries using Natural

We can write our package using the latest JavaScript syntax with a compilation step. In this lesson we will install `babel-cli` and `babel-preset-latest` and wire up a `build` script to compile our code using the babel “latest” preset when source files change. This means those using our package can use it in any version of JavaScript even though we are using the latest syntax for our source code.

Set up compilation of source code using babel with npm scripts

In this lesson, we’ll see how to use Natural’s probabilistic spell-checker, which uses the trie data structure. 

Include spell-check in text projects using Natural

Tf-idf, or term frequency-inverse document frequency, is a statistic that indicates how important a word is to the entire document. This lesson will explain term frequency and inverse document frequency, and show how we can use tf-idf to identify the most relevant words in a body of text. 

Identify the most important words in a document using tf-idf in Natural

In this lesson, we’ll take a look at Natural’s phonetics feature. We’ll learn how to check whether two words sound alike, looking at both the SoundEx and Metaphone algorithms.

Check if words sound alike using Natural

This lesson introduces WordNet, which is an important resource in natural language processing. With WordNet, we can look up a word’s definition, or find its synonyms.

Find a word’s definition using WordNet in Natural

An important component of many natural language processing projects is being able to identify the grammar of a piece of text. We’ll learn how to do that with Natural’s parts of speech (POS) tagger.  

There are many tags, and it's worth looking them up online (search "POS tag symbols") to become familiar with them all. 

The setup of the tagger may seem a little strange, but it allows you to replace the lexicon or the rules with a different lexicon or rule set of your choice. 

Tag parts of speech using Natural

By this point we've seen that classification can take a long time, and with more data, it would take even longer. Luckily, Natural provides support to save your classifiers. In this lesson, we will learn how to save a classifier and load it into a new project in order to classify new data.

Using machine learning classifiers in a new project

A part of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is processing text by “tokenizing” language strings. This means we can break up a string of text into parts by word, sentence, etc. In this lesson, we will use the `natural` library to tokenize a string. First, we will break the string into words using `WordTokenizer`, `WordPunctTokenizer`, and `TreebankWordTokenizer`. Then we will break the string into sentences using `RegexpTokenizer`.

Break up language strings into parts using Natural

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

AngularJS animations and TweenLite make it really easy to create cool 3d effects in your application.

3d Animations with Greensock TweenLite

Babel is a compiler that lets us right future JavaScript not yet fully in browsers (ES6 / ES2015, ES7 / ES2016, etc) and transpile it back into code that can be used now. We'll walk through installing babel, writing some future JS syntax, transpiling it, and running it in a browser.

**This lesson is out of date and uses an older version of Babel.**

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