Curious on how to use some basic machine learning in a web application

Question

A co-worker and I had an idea to create a little web game where a user enters a chunk of data about themselves and then the application would write for them to sound like them in certain structures. (Trying to leave the idea a little vague.) We are both new to ML and thought this could be a fun first dive.

We have a decent bit of background with PHP, JavaScript (FE and Node), Ruby a little bit of other languages, and have had interest in learning Python for ML. Curious if you can run a cost efficient ML library for text well with a web app, being most servers lack GPUs?

Perhaps you have to pay for one of the cloud based systems, but wanted to find the best entry point for this idea without racking up too much cost. (So far I have been reading about running Pytorch or TensorFlow, but it sounds like you lose a lot of efficiency running with CPUs.)

Thank you!

(My other thought is doing it via an iOS app and trying Apple's ML setup.)

Answer 1

Yes, before jumping into training something with Deep Learning; (this might even be un-necessary for your purpose) try to build a nice and simple baseline for this. Before Deep Learning (just a few yrs ago) people did similar tasks using n-gram feature based language models. https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/3.pdf Essentially you try to predict the next few words probabilistically given a small context(of n-words; typically n is small like 5 or 6)

This should be a lot of fun to work out and will certainly do quite well with a small amount of data. Also such a model will run blazingly fast; so you don't have to worry about GPUs and compute . To improve on these results with Deep Learning, you'll need to collect a ton of data first; and it will be work to get it to be fast on a web based platform

Answer 2

It sounds like you are looking for something like Tensorflow JS