Learning Korean FastText at the Character Level Using Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing is a technology that allows computers to understand and process human language, and it has achieved significant results due to the recent advancements in deep learning technology. This article will discuss in detail how to learn Korean at the character level using FastText, a deep learning-based natural language processing technique.

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Deep Learning

Natural language processing is a technology that combines knowledge from various fields such as linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence to process human language. Deep learning serves as a powerful tool for natural language processing, especially because it enables learning based on large amounts of data. This contributes to understanding the complex patterns and meanings of language.

2. What is FastText?

FastText is an open-source library developed by Facebook AI Research that numerically represents the meaning of words through word vectorization. FastText is similar to the existing Word2Vec method, but it effectively handles words with different spellings by breaking them down into individual n-grams for learning.

For example, the word ‘loving’ is decomposed into ‘sa’, ‘rang’, ‘ha’, ‘neun’, allowing the meanings of each component to be learned as well. This is particularly useful for complicated morphological languages like Korean.

3. The Need for FastText for Character-Level Korean Processing

Korean is a unique language where characters are formed by the combination of letters. Due to this characteristic, existing word-based approaches may not adequately capture the nuances of Korean, which is often used at the character level. By using FastText, learning at the character level becomes possible, facilitating a better understanding of the various forms and meanings of Korean.

4. Installing FastText

FastText is provided as a Python library. To install it, you can easily use pip:

pip install fasttext

5. Preparing the Data

To train a model, you first need to prepare the dataset you will use. Collect Korean document data, perform data preprocessing to remove unnecessary symbols or special characters, and tidy up spaces and line breaks. For example, you can preprocess the data in the following way:


import pandas as pd

# Load data
data = pd.read_csv('korean_text.csv')

# Remove unnecessary columns
data = data[['text']]

# Text preprocessing
data['text'] = data['text'].str.replace('[^가-힣 ]', '')

6. Splitting into Characters

To split Korean sentences into characters, an understanding of the consonants and vowels of Hangul is necessary. For example, you can write a function to separate characters from a given sentence:


import re

def split_into_jamo(text):
    jamo_pattern = re.compile('[가-힣]')
    return [jamo for jamo in text if jamo_pattern.match(jamo)]

data['jamo'] = data['text'].apply(split_into_jamo)

7. Training the FastText Model

Now you can train the FastText model using the preprocessed character-level data. FastText requires a text file format for training.


data['jamo'].to_csv('jamo_data.txt', header=None, index=None, sep=' ')

Now you can train the FastText model in the following way:


import fasttext

model = fasttext.train_unsupervised('jamo_data.txt', model='skipgram')

8. Evaluating the Model

After the model is trained, you need to evaluate its performance. You can analyze performance using the similarity word search function provided by FastText.


words = model.get_nearest_neighbors('sa')

Using the code above, you can find similar characters to the character ‘sa’, which allows you to evaluate the model’s performance.

9. Applications

The trained model can be utilized in various natural language processing applications. For example, it can be effectively applied in text classification, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and more. Additionally, using characters will contribute to solving various types of problems that can arise in the Korean language.

10. Conclusion

The character-level Korean processing technology using FastText is very effective in modeling the complex structure of Korean by leveraging deep learning. This is expected to lead to more mature research and development of the Korean language in the field of natural language processing. It is hoped that such technologies will continue to evolve and contribute to capturing even more linguistic nuances.

References

  • Facebook AI Research. (2016). FastText: Library for efficient text classification and representation.
  • Park, H. (2018). Natural Language Processing with Python. O’Reilly Media.
  • Kim, Y. (2014). Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification. EMNLP.