Course: Data Analysis Techniques (for Logistics Technology)
Level: Undergraduate
Week 6: Text Preprocessing and Feature Vectorization
Learning Overview
By the end of this week, students will be able to:
• Understand the nature and characteristics of text data in logistics operations.
• Apply text preprocessing techniques such as tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, and
stopword removal.
• Convert text into numerical features using techniques like Bag-of-Words, TF-IDF, and
word embeddings.
• Explore practical applications of text analytics in logistics such as sentiment analysis and
customer feedback processing.
• Prepare text data for use in further analytics or predictive modeling tasks.
Lecture Content (Theory)
1. Introduction to Text Data in Logistics
• Examples: customer reviews, shipment comments, driver notes, support tickets.
• Challenges in processing natural language data.
• Text analytics workflow: preprocessing → feature extraction → modeling.
2. Text Preprocessing Techniques
• Text normalization: lowercasing, removing punctuation and digits.
• Tokenization: word-level and sentence-level.
• Stopword removal and its impact on analysis.
• Stemming vs. Lemmatization: pros and cons.
• Handling multilingual text and logistics-specific terminology.
3. Feature Vectorization
• From text to numbers: why feature extraction is necessary.
• Bag-of-Words (BoW) model.
• TF-IDF (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency).
• Word embeddings: Word2Vec, GloVe (conceptual introduction).
• Representing documents as numerical matrices.
4. Applications of Text Analytics in Logistics
• Sentiment analysis of customer complaints.
• Topic extraction from delivery notes.
• Identifying frequent issues or patterns in feedback.
• Using textual data for operational improvements.
Hands-on / Practice Activities
Exercise 1: Text Cleaning and Tokenization
• Dataset: customer_feedback.csv (columns: feedback_text, rating).
• Remove punctuation, lowercase all text, and tokenize into words.
• Remove stopwords and apply stemming or lemmatization.
Exercise 2: Feature Vectorization
• Use scikit-learn’s CountVectorizer and TfidfVectorizer to create document-term matrices.
• Compare word frequency distributions and TF-IDF weights.
• Identify the most important words across feedback categories.
Exercise 3: Mini Sentiment Analysis
• Create a simple sentiment score based on positive/negative keywords.
• Visualize sentiment distribution across customer segments.
Exercise 4: Word Cloud Visualization
• Generate a word cloud to summarize the most frequent terms.
• Discuss what insights can be derived from it in a logistics context.
In-class Activities
• Warm-up: Discuss where text data appears in logistics systems.
• Pair Activity: Clean a short text dataset using different preprocessing methods.
• Group Discussion: Which feature extraction method works best for short text vs. long
reports?
• Mini Challenge: Identify the top 5 complaint themes from the provided dataset.
Suggested Readings / References
• Jurafsky, D., & Martin, J. H. (2023). Speech and Language Processing (3rd Ed. Draft).
Stanford University.
• Bird, S., Klein, E., & Loper, E. (2009). Natural Language Processing with Python. O’Reilly
Media.
• McKinney, W. (2022). Python for Data Analysis. O’Reilly Media.
• scikit-learn documentation: [Link]
[Link]/stable/modules/feature_extraction.html
• Tutorial: “Text Preprocessing and TF-IDF in Python” (Kaggle).
Preparation for Next Week
Before Week 7, students should:
• Experiment with TF-IDF and word embeddings on their selected datasets.
• Identify one possible use of time-series data in logistics operations.
• Read: Python Data Science Handbook, Chapter 4 – Working with Text Data.