Final Capstone Project - Predict Next Word - Language Modeling Capstone Project (coursera.org)

This presentation is a high level description of the language modeling Capstone Project of Coursera Data Science Specilization

The purpose of this project is to build a natural language model that suggests an appropriate next unseen word in the user specified words sequence. Three types of data including twitter, news and blogs were consumed to train the model. Appropriate data cleaning and sub-setting techniques were applied to finalize the training data. Various word combinations (N-Grams) were then created using clean data sets and a predictive algorithm (Katz Back-off) was applied to predict next word. The final predictive model was optimized appropriately to work as a Shiny application.

Shiny App URL

Project Software

Prior to building word prediction algorithm, the following steps were executed to handle and clean very large twitter, news and blogs files

• A subset of the original data was randomly selected from the three sources and merged into one.
• Due to limitation of computation resources data was divided into various small chunks before cleaning.
• Data cleaning involved converting to lower case, removing punctuations, numbers and non printable characters.
• Four sets of word combinations (n-grams), with 4-words, 3-words, 2-words, and 1-word were then created.
• After calculating their cumulative frequencies, these four n-grams were sorted and saved.
• Low frequency n-grams were further filtered to reduce their size for optimum performance.
• Finally, the four n-gram objects were saved as R-Compressed files (.RData files).

The next word prediction model is based on the Katz Back-off algorithm. Here are the steps involved in predicting the next word of the user specified sentence

• Load four compressed data sets containing sorted n-grams with cumulative frequencies.
• Filter the user specified sequence of words by applying same techniques to clean the training data sets.
• Depending upon the number of words specified by the user, extract last three or two or the last one word.
• First use a 4-gram; the first three words of which are the last three words of the user provided sentence.
• If no 4-gram is matched, back-off to 3-gram. Match first two words of 3-gram with last two words of the sentence.
• If no 3-gram is matched, back-off to 2-gram. Match first word of 2-gram with last word of the sentence.
• Finally if no match found in 2-grams, use the most frequent word from 1-gram as next word.

A Shiny application was developed based on the next word prediction model described previously. Here are key features of the App

• User enters a sequence of words in the text box, then press “Next Word” button.
• The predicted next word is displayed with a note indicating which specific n-gram was used for next word prediction.
• User entered sentence is also displayed in the Shiny GUI.