A simple classifier

This recipe is a thought experiment that should help make clear what machine learning does. Recall the Training your own language model classifier recipe in Chapter 1, Simple Classifiers, to train your own sentiment classifier in the recipe. Consider what a conservative approach to the same problem might be—build Map<String,String> from the inputs to the correct class. This recipe will explore how this might work and what its consequences might be.

How to do it...

Brace yourself; this will be spectacularly stupid but hopefully informative.

1. Enter the following in the command line:

   java -cp lingpipe-cookbook.1.0.jar:lib/lingpipe-4.1.0.jar:lib/opencsv-2.4.jar com.lingpipe.cookbook.chapter3.OverfittingClassifier
   

2. The usual anemic prompt appears, with some user input:

   Training
   Type a string to be classified. Empty string to quit.
   When all else fails #Disney
   Category is: e

3. It correctly gets the language as e or English. However, everything else is about to fail. Next, we will...