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

spaCy


Having discussed some of the basics of text analysis, let's dive head first into our first Python package we'll be learning to use - spaCy [1].

spaCy describes itself asIndustrial Strength Natural Language Processing – and it most certainly does its best to live up to this promise. Focused on getting things done rather than a more academic approach, spaCy ships with only one part-of-speech tagging algorithm and only one named-entity-recognizer (per language). What this also means is that the package is not bloated with unnecessary features.

We previously mentionedacademic approach – what does this mean? A large number of the open-source packages in the natural language processing and machine learning are usually created or maintained by researchers and those working in academia. While they do end upworking– the aim of the projects is not to provide state-of-the-art implementations of algorithms.NLTK [2] is one such example, where the primary focus of the library is to give students and...