appendix C Vectors and linear algebra
The goal of natural language processing is to give machines the ability to understand and work with human language. To do this, you need to translate language into a numerical form that computers can process: a sequence of numbers. Linear algebra is a branch of math that deals with sequences of numbers called vectors and describes rules for calculations and operations you can do with vectors. So by representing characters, words, sentences, and higher-level concepts using vectors, the tools of linear algebra can be used to build machines that make order out of the complexity of language.