CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstringmachine-learningtensorflow
Domenic Quirl
Domenic Quirl

Reputation: 115

TensorFlow fails to convert string to number

I'm building a neural network that is supposed to classify input words in some way. Without going into much detail on the network itself, I was looking for a way to convert my input words to an integer format, in order to use TensorFlow's tf.nn.embedding_lookup(...) for input encoding.

I noticed that tf.string_to_number() exists, so I tried using that, but it failed. First I thought it was related to what I'm doing in my network, but even when doing something like 

import tensorflow as tf
s = tf.string_to_number("TEST", out_type=tf.int32)
sess = tf.InteractiveSession()
sess.run(s)

in a python console, I get the same error of

tensorflow.python.framework.errors.InvalidArgumentError: 
StringToNumberOp could not correctly convert string: TEST

I also tried creating a tf.constant("TEST", dtype=tf.string) first and passing that on to tf.string_to_number() and ran this test code on a webserver to make sure it wasn't related to my setup, but with the same result.

Can anyone tell me what I'm missing here? Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7002

Answers (1)

lejlot
lejlot

Reputation: 66835

Can anyone tell me what I'm missing here?

You are missing the purpose of string_to_number it is supposed to convert a number, represented as string, to the numerical type, like tf.string_to_number('1'), it is not "one hot encoder" for strings (how would it be able to figure out the size in the vocab in the first place?)

There is a nice tutorial in tensorflow itself which shows how to train embedding models in word2vec_basic.py which goes through everything, starting with data reading and ending with full embedding using the lookup op.

Upvotes: 7

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