How to use Azure Cognitive Services Text Analytics

Overview

This Read Me and its accompanying Jupyter Notebook provides instructions, code, and sample text to walk you through basic machine learning text analysis using Azure Cognitive Services. Specifically, the Jupyter Notebook will show you how to extract key phrases and entities, such as people, locations, and organizations, from a series of lengthy text documents.

The notebook provides context about the Cognitive Services Python SDK and troubleshooting information so you can take what you've learned and apply it to your own needs!

• Read Time: 10 min
• Build Time: 20 - 30 min

Why is this helpful?

Doing this kind of text analysis can reduce time and energy required to understand long, open-form text. It can also highlight trends that might otherwise be overlooked.

Possible applications

• Open-form survey responses
• Customer reviews
• Social media comment analysis

Cost Overview

Cognitive Services Text Analytics offers a free tier that include up to 5000 tansactions per month. However, using virtual machines (VMs) can incur signifcant costs (between $50 and $75 per month).

To keep the cost of this example as low as possible, we'll run the Cognitive Services client and all of our code locally using VS Code and the Python extension.

To avoid any surprise costs in the future, when you're done with analysis, remember to delete the resource group.

What's in the repo:

• text-analytics-notebook.ipynb: A Jupyter notebook that contains explanatory text and code blocks that will walk you through setting up and using Azure Text Analytics
• TextFiles folder: Sample text files for you to run
• Images: Screenshots and other supporting images for the Jupyter notebook.

Prior Knowledge

This tutorial assumes you have some knowledge of VS Code, Python, and Jupyter Notebooks. New to these things? No problem! Check out the resources below:

1. Setting up VS Code
2. Getting started with Python in VS Code
3. Using Jupyter Notebooks in VS Code

Setting up Azure Cognitive Services

If you're new to Cognitive Services, you'll need a Microsoft Azure subscription. If you do not already have one, you can sign up for a free trial at: https://azure.microsoft.com/free

Step 1: Set up an Azure Text Analytics resource

If you don't already have one, use the following steps to create a Text Analytics resource in your Azure subscription:

1. In another browser tab, open the Azure portal at: https://portal.azure.com

2. Click the ＋Create a resource button, search for Text Analytics, and create a Cognitive Services resource with the following settings:

   • Name: Enter a unique name.
   • Subscription: Your Azure subscription.
   • Location: Any available location.
   • Pricing tier: Free F0
   • Resource group: Create a resource group with a unique name.

3. Deployment will take a few minutes, but that's okay! We won't need it just yet. Onward Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope Processto the next step!

Step 2: Open the text-analytics-walkthrough notebook in VS Code and run through the code blocks!

1. Open the text-analytics-notebook.ipynb notebook.
2. Read through the notebook and run the code blocks as you go.

Aside: Tracking expenses and setting a budget

1. Go to your Azure Portal home page

2. Selecting the Resources Group for this service.

3. In the new window, select the "Cost analysis" section (under "Cost management" on the left-hand side). There you can see a cost breakdown of each service as well as forecasted costs.

4. You can also set a budget by clicking on the "Budget" drop-down and selecting "Create a new budget".

   Note that this will send you an e-mail alert when you are close to your budget limit, it will not stop the services.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions and suggestions. Most contributions require you to agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right to, and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit https://cla.opensource.microsoft.com.

When you submit a pull request, a CLA bot will automatically determine whether you need to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., status check, comment). Simply follow the instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repos using our CLA.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Trademarks

This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft's Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party's policies.