Is a movie review positive or negative? Five different classifiers decide

As part of the Machine Learning in Practice course at Radboud University, I took part in two Kaggle competitions in a team with five other students. This blog will revolve around the competition called Bag of Words Meets Bags of Popcorn.   “Is AI a bad thing?” This competition concerned sentiment analysis of movie reviews. …

Can computers replace teachers? Automatically grading exams with vector space models

Below you can see two pictures of me. In the left one, I’m grading a big pile of student papers, feeling stressed and tired. Imagine how nice it would be if I could let my computer do all of this work, so that I can spend more time relaxing with my cat like in the …

Named Entity Recognition (NER): Extracting a timeline from biographical texts

Texts written in natural language are generally unstructured, meaning that they are not organized in a pre-defined structure, such as a table. Rather, writers often mean to tell a story, and let their text flow freely in sentences and paragraphs. While such texts typically are more fun to read, the information they contain is not …

Who wrote this text? Authorship attribution with SVM

Authorship attribution is the task of detecting who has written a certain text. As a famous example, researchers unmasked crime writer Robert Galbraith in fact to be J.K. Rowling, the writer of the Harry Potter books. In this blog post, I will explore and explain the use of the support vector machine (SVM) classification algorithm …