In recent years, machine learning as a service has come of age, with robust capabilities from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others now available through REST APIs for a fraction of the cost of deploying or developing your own capabilities. One of the better known – if not easy to separate hype from reality – is IBM Watson. While Watson gained fame as the Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer, IBM now uses the brand for a wide variety of machine learning capabilities from speech-to-text and conversational bots to text mining algorithms for understanding the concepts, references and tone of text-based content.
In this post, we'll cover how to integrate one such IBM service – Natural Language Understanding – and rapidly prototype an application that you can try on your own content. It includes how to get started with IBM's hosted service Bluemix and the Python code to connect to the REST API. I've also included a working data application that you can run with your own text.
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