A new version (v0.9.0) has recently been released, so we use this as an opportunity to play with some new functionality. The goal of today's post will be to perform sentiment analysis on movie reviews from IMDB. Note: ML.NET is still evolving, this post was written using Microsoft.ML v0.9.0. If you don't have it installed, head out to the .NET Core Downloads page. Tangential, but you can also get here by going to dot.net, then navigating to Downloads and .NET Core.

Earlier this year (May 2018) Microsoft announced ML.NET, an open source and cross-platform machine learning framework built for .NET developers. It is exciting news to be able to integrate custom machine learning with .NET/C# applications. Although ML.NET is still in preview release version 0.5.0 at the time of writing, you can test drive it to explore the potential power of the framework. There are already a number of tutorials for ML.NET available from Microsoft and third parties. However, the example data sources are mostly flat files in the format of TSV (Tab Separated Values).