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

Why we need parsing


I again want to take you guys back to school, where we learned grammar. Now tell me why you learnt grammar Do you really need to learn grammar? The answer is definitely yes! When we grow, we learn our native languages. Now, when we typically learn languages, we learn a small set of vocabulary. We learn to combine small chunks of phrases and then small sentences. By learning each example sentence, we learn the structure of the language. Your mom might have corrected you many times when you uttered an incorrect sentence. We apply a similar process when we try to understand the sentence, but the process is so common that we never actually pay attention to it or think about it in detail. Maybe the next time you correct someone's grammar, you will understand.

When it comes to writing a parser, we try to replicate the same process here. If we come up with a set of rules that can be used as a template to write the sentences in a proper order. We also need the words that can fit...