5 Word brain: Neural networks
This chapter covers
- Building a base layer for your neural networks
- Training neural networks with backpropagation
- Implementing a basic neural network in Python
- Implementing a scalable neural network in PyTorch
- Stacking network layers for better data representation
- Tuning up your neural network for better performance
When you read word brain in the title of this chapter, the neurons in your brain likely started firing, trying to remind you where you’d heard something like that before. And now that you read the word heard, your neurons might be connecting the words in the title to the part of your brain that processes the sound of words. And maybe, the neurons in your auditory cortex are starting to connect the phrase word brain to common phrases that rhyme with it, such as bird brain.
Even if our brains didn’t predict your brain very well, you’re about to build a small brain yourself that can process a single word and predict something about what it means. This word brain you are about to build will be a lot better than our collective human brains, at least for some particularly hard NLP tasks. A neural net can even make predictions about meaning when the word it is processing is a person’s name that doesn’t seem to mean anything at all to a human.