can we use autoencoders for text data

Question

I am doing my project based on health care.I am going to train my autoencoders with the symptoms and the diseases i.e my input is in textual form. Will that work? (I am using Rstudio).Please anyone help me with this

Answer 1

You have to convert the text to vectors/numbers. To do this traditional approaches like Bag of words, Tf-Idf will help but the latest Neural Word Embedding like Word2Vec, RNN Language model etc are the best techniques to obtain numeric representation of text. Please use any Neural Word Embedding technique and convert the text(word level[word2vec], document level[doc2vec]) into numbers/vectors. Now these vectors come with some dimension and to compress this representation to even smaller dimension u can use AutoEncoder. Feel Free to ask any other information required. Try using Python for these tasks as it has the latest packages.