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

Summary


We've seen in this chapter why it makes sense to change our representation of text from words to numbers, and why this is the only language a computer understands. There are different ways computers can interpret words, and TF-IDF and bag of words are two such vector representations. Gensim is a Python package that offers us ways to generate such vector representations, which are later used as inputs into various machine learning and information retrieval algorithms.

There are further preprocessing techniques such as creating n-grams, collocations and removing low-frequency words, which can help us arrive at better results. The concepts of vectors form a basis in natural language processing and we can now get back to using spaCy's pipelines; indeed, Chapter 5, POS-Tagging and Its Applications, Chapter 6, NER-Tagging and Its Applications, andChapter 7Dependency Parsing, all showcase the power of spaCy, and we will start with POS-tagging algorithms using spaCy.