Given a short review of a product, like "I couldn't put it down!", can you predict what the product is? In that case it's pretty easy — it's for a book — but this general problem of text categorization comes up in a lot of natural language analysis problems. In his talk at useR!2017 (shown below), Microsoft data scientist Angus Taylor demonstrates how to build a text categorization model in R. He applies a convolutional neural network (trained using the R interface to the MXNET deep learning platform) to Amazon review data, and creates a small Shiny app to categorize...