I have a problem with regards to text classification/categorization. The task is bugging me for days already and as I am pretty new to AI and the field of natural language processing (NLP) I am just overwhelmed by the content online and available tools/libraries (e.g. NLTK, Keras, spaCy, etc.). It would be awesome if you could give me some guidance or clues on how you would approach the problem.
Issue: basicially I try to set up a tool for classifying text. I already have an extensive labeled dataset to work with. The input will always be a list of some sort (think of an Excel file with 500 rows). Each row contains a single word or a combination of words, i.e. no sentences.
A simplified example of my labeled dataset - input on the left, classification on the right:
- "dog" -> "animal"
- "dog owner" -> "person"
- "dog owner house" -> "building"
- "owner" -> "person"
- "dog food" -> "food"
- "food court" -> "building"
The dataset has around 2,000 of these classifications with in total 50 unique categories. How can I set up an algorithm that scans the input for example for the word "dog" - if it is only "dog" then it is the category "animal", if it is "dog" and "owner" it is the category "person", if it is "dog", "owner" and "house" it is the category "building" and so on.
If I set up a ton of if-else-statements as a decision tree it is just cumbersome and intransparent. Is there a way with NLP to solve such an issue?
Thank you very much in advance! Looking very much forward to your ideas and please let me know if I have to be more specific in any way.
Best regards, pythoneer
