Natural Language Processing with Python  (English, Paperback, Loper Edward)

Natural Language Processing With Python introduces NLP concepts and shows how to write NLP programs using the Python language.

Summary Of The Book

Natural Language Processing (NLP) combines concepts from varied fields like Computing, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence to come up with solutions for processing of speech and text.

Natural Language Processing can be used in various applications like email filtering and translations. Natural Language Processing With Python provides a comprehensive introduction to NLP. It then explains how to develop NLP solutions using Python.

It uses Python along with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), an open source library. The NLTK is a rich resource consisting of data, documentation and software that together help in processing human languages. The NLTK can be downloaded on any platform, Windows, Unix or Macintosh.

The book explains programming basics, introduces the Python language and shows how to use Python for NLP. It also explains the concepts involved in language processing. It explains the common algorithms used in analyzing written text. It shows how to access many linguistic databases like treebanks and WordNet, and how to analyze the structure in text documents using techniques like semantic analysis and parsing.

Natural Language Processing With Python discusses how to extract useful information from text sources, like identifying the topic the text is about, or finding named entities within the text.

The book shows how to develop programs using Python and the NLTK for various kinds of applications like translations, extraction of information for business purposes, understanding words being typed and providing predictive text, and in many ways improving human-machine interaction by directly understanding human languages.

The book teaches the various concepts using many fully worked examples. The example codes can be reused in many applications. Thus, this book not only helps the readers understand the NLP concepts and write programs for NLP using Python, it also provides useful resources for use in future projects.

About The Authors

Steven Bird is a Professor and Research Scientist.

Steven Bird earned his Ph.D from the University of Edinburgh. His research subject was computational phonology. He was with the Linguistic Data Consortium for several years as an Associate Director. He set up a Language Technology Research Group at Melbourne University, where he is now an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

Ewan Klein is a Professor of Language Technology.

Ewan Klein earned his Ph.D from Cambridge University, in Formal Semantics. After working for a few years at other universities like the University of Sussex, he joined the Faculty of the University of Edinburgh. He established a Language Technology Group at that university. He is now the Professor of Language Technology at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics.

Edward Loper is a Research Scientist.

Edward Loper has a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Research Scientist at BBN Technologies. His research interests include machine learning and computational linguistics. He was also part of the team that developed the NLTK.