Popular NLP Algorithms: Advantages, Disadvantages, and Comparison
1. Bag of Words (BoW)
Advantages:
- Simple to implement and understand.
- Works well for small datasets.
- Efficient in terms of computation.
Disadvantages:
- Ignores grammar and word order.
- High-dimensional and sparse.
- Cannot capture semantic meaning or context.
2. TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency)
Advantages:
- Highlights important and unique words.
- Improves upon BoW by reducing weight of common terms.
- Easy to interpret.
Disadvantages:
- Still ignores context and word order.
- Cannot understand synonyms or polysemy.
- Sparse vector representation.
3. Word2Vec
Advantages:
- Captures semantic similarity.
- Low-dimensional dense vectors.
- Efficient to train with large corpora.
Disadvantages:
- Context-independent.
- Doesnt perform well with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words.
- Requires a lot of training data.
4. GloVe
Advantages:
- Captures both local and global statistics.
- Semantic-rich embeddings.
- Pretrained models available.
Disadvantages:
- Context-independent.
- Large memory requirement.
- OOV words still a problem.
5. FastText
Advantages:
- Handles rare and OOV words using subword info.
- Performs well on morphologically rich languages.
- Pretrained models are widely available.
Disadvantages:
- Slightly heavier than Word2Vec.
- Not context-sensitive.
6. RNN
Advantages:
- Maintains memory of previous inputs.
- Models word order and dependencies.
Disadvantages:
- Struggles with long sequences.
- Slow and hard to parallelize.
7. LSTM/GRU
Advantages:
- Captures long-term dependencies.
- Better than vanilla RNNs.
Disadvantages:
- Computationally intensive.
- Slower than transformers.
8. BERT
Advantages:
- Contextual embeddings.
- State-of-the-art on many tasks.
- Pretrained models available.
Disadvantages:
- Large and memory-heavy.
- Complex fine-tuning.
9. GPT
Advantages:
- Excellent for text generation.
- Learns long-range dependencies.
- Scalable.
Disadvantages:
- Unidirectional.
- High compute requirements.
10. T5 / BART
Advantages:
- Flexible encoder-decoder models.
- State-of-the-art for many benchmarks.
Disadvantages:
- Large model sizes.
- Requires fine-tuning.
Comparison:
- BoW/TF-IDF: Fast, interpretable, sparse.
- Word2Vec/GloVe/FastText: Dense, semantically rich, static.
- RNN/LSTM/GRU: Sequence-aware, slower, better for time-series.
- BERT/GPT/T5: Context-aware, powerful, high resource usage.
Steps to Implement NLP: Detailed Breakdown
1. Text Collection
- Collect from websites, APIs, datasets.
- Use web scraping, public APIs, or download corpora.
2. Text Preprocessing
- Tokenization: Split into words/sentences.
- Lowercasing, stopword removal, punctuation stripping.
- Stemming and lemmatization to reduce to base forms.
- Optional: Spell correction, number/special char handling.
3. Text Representation (Vectorization)
- Bag of Words, TF-IDF for traditional ML.
- Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText for dense vectors.
- BERT/GPT for contextual embeddings.
4. Feature Engineering
- Add sentiment score, POS tags, text length, etc.
- Use tools like NLTK, spaCy, TextBlob.
5. Model Building
- Traditional ML: Naive Bayes, SVM, Logistic Regression.
- Deep Learning: RNN, LSTM, GRU, Transformers.
6. Model Training and Evaluation
- Use train/test split, cross-validation.
- Metrics: Accuracy, F1-score, ROC-AUC, BLEU/ROUGE for generation.
7. Inference & Prediction
- Use trained model to process new data.
- Apply for tasks like sentiment analysis, summarization.
8. Deployment
- REST APIs using Flask/FastAPI.
- Docker, Streamlit, Hugging Face Inference.
9. Monitoring & Maintenance
- Track model drift and performance.
- Retrain as needed.
Summary:
1. Collection
2. Preprocessing
3. Representation
4. Feature Engineering
5. Model Training
6. Evaluation
7. Inference
8. Deployment
9. Monitoring
