by Roman Egger

Salzburg University of Applied Sciences, Innovation and Management in Tourism

Today, a vast amount of unstructured text data is consistently at our disposal. Owing to the rapid increase in user-generated content on the one hand and powerful, ready-to-use machine learning algorithms on the other hand, automated text analysis can now be carried out in a way that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. However, in order to be able to analyze textual data further, it first becomes necessary to extract features and transform the text into numerical values which is required by many algorithms. As such, this chapter will present the basics of vectorizing text, beginning with the most simple approaches of text representation and increasing in complexity and performance as each subsequent algorithm is presented. The aim of this chapter is, thus, to convey the intuition behind each approach in a straightforward manner and to focus on the elements that are relevant for practical application.