Book Image

NLTK Essentials

By : Nitin Hardeniya
Book Image

NLTK Essentials

By: Nitin Hardeniya

Overview of this book

<p>Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics that deals with the interactions between computers and human languages. With the instances of human-computer interaction increasing, it’s becoming imperative for computers to comprehend all major natural languages. Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is one such powerful and robust tool.</p> <p>You start with an introduction to get the gist of how to build systems around NLP. We then move on to explore data science-related tasks, following which you will learn how to create a customized tokenizer and parser from scratch. Throughout, we delve into the essential concepts of NLP while gaining practical insights into various open source tools and libraries available in Python for NLP. You will then learn how to analyze social media sites to discover trending topics and perform sentiment analysis. Finally, you will see tools which will help you deal with large scale text.</p> <p>By the end of this book, you will be confident about NLP and data science concepts and know how to apply them in your day-to-day work.</p>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
NLTK Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, you learned about another great Python library and now, you don't need help from anybody for your data needs. You learned how you can write a very sophisticated crawling system, and now you know how to write a focused spider. In this chapter, we saw how to abstract the item logic from the main system and how to write some specific spider for the most common use cases. We know some of the most common settings that need to be taken care of in order to implement our own spider and we wrote some complex parse methods that can be reused. We understand selectors very well and know a hands-on way of figuring out what kind of elements we want for specific item attributes, and we also went through Firebug to get more of a practical understanding of selectors. Last but not least, very importantly, make sure that you follow the security guidelines of the websites you crawl.

In the next chapter, we will explore some essential Python libraries that can be used for natural language...