How are neural networks used when the number of inputs could be variable?

Question

All the examples I have seen of neural networks are for a fixed set of inputs which works well for images and fixed length data. How do you deal with variable length data such sentences, queries or source code? Is there a way to encode variable length data into fixed length inputs and still get the generalization properties of neural networks?

Answer 1

You would usually extract features from the data and feed those to the network. It is not advisable to take just some data and feed it to net. In practice, pre-processing and choosing the right features will decide over your success and the performance of the neural net. Unfortunately, IMHO it takes experience to develop a sense for that and it's nothing one can learn from a book.

Summing up: "Garbage in, garbage out"