Project Summary

The goal of this project is to give you a taste of the environment and tools you will most likely come across in a front end role. Your focus should be to understand the role every tool and technology is playing in the overall architecture, but you shouldn’t feel the need to memorize the particular commands, config setups, or structure that we create here. Every company - and even every project - will have its own custom setup, but if you understand the moving pieces you will be able to get the gist of even far more complicated projects than this one.

What You Will Build

We will be building web tool that allows users to run Natural Language Processing (NLP) on articles or blogs found on other websites. Using an exciting new api called Aylien, we can build a simple web interface to interact with their NLP system. This tool will give us back pertinent information about the article, like whether the content is subjective (opinion) or objective (fact-based) and whether it is positive, neutral, or negative in tone.

Node and express will be the webserver and routing, and webpack will be our build tool of choice. Using webpack, we will set up the app to have dev and prod environments, each with their own set of tools and commands.

More About Natural Language Processing

NLP is considered its own branch of computer science, focused on computers’ ability to process and even interact with natural human speech. Machine learning and deep learning are used on massive amounts of data to obtain the rules and understanding of nuance in human speech. Everyone who has used Alexa or Google Assistant or other voice command systems knows that they are always improving - but they aren’t perfect. Verbal interactions can be incredibly hard to decipher. Sarcasm, for instance, requires understanding not just words and grammar but tone as well, and regional accents and ways of saying things have to be taken into account, not to mention coverage for all the major languages.