Book Image

Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

By : Bhargav Srinivasa-Desikan
Book Image

Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

By: Bhargav Srinivasa-Desikan

Overview of this book

Modern text analysis is now very accessible using Python and open source tools, so discover how you can now perform modern text analysis in this era of textual data. This book shows you how to use natural language processing, and computational linguistics algorithms, to make inferences and gain insights about data you have. These algorithms are based on statistical machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. The tools to work with these algorithms are available to you right now - with Python, and tools like Gensim and spaCy. You'll start by learning about data cleaning, and then how to perform computational linguistics from first concepts. You're then ready to explore the more sophisticated areas of statistical NLP and deep learning using Python, with realistic language and text samples. You'll learn to tag, parse, and model text using the best tools. You'll gain hands-on knowledge of the best frameworks to use, and you'll know when to choose a tool like Gensim for topic models, and when to work with Keras for deep learning. This book balances theory and practical hands-on examples, so you can learn about and conduct your own natural language processing projects and computational linguistics. You'll discover the rich ecosystem of Python tools you have available to conduct NLP - and enter the interesting world of modern text analysis.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Exploring documents

Once we have our topic model of choice set up, we can use it to analyze our corpus, and also get some more insight into the nature of our topic models. While it is certainly useful to know what kind of topics are present in our dataset, to go one step further we should be able to, for example, cluster or classify our documents based on what topics they are made out of.

In our Jupyter notebook example from Chapter 8, Topic Models, let's start looking at document-topic proportions. What exactly are these? When we were looking at topics in the previous chapter, we were observing topic-word proportions - what are the odds of certain words appearing in certain topics. We previously mentioned that we assumed that documents are generated from topics - by identifying document-topic proportions, we can see exactly how the topics generated the documents.

So, do...