Book Image

Natural Language Processing Fundamentals

By : Sohom Ghosh, Dwight Gunning
Book Image

Natural Language Processing Fundamentals

By: Sohom Ghosh, Dwight Gunning

Overview of this book

If NLP hasn't been your forte, Natural Language Processing Fundamentals will make sure you set off to a steady start. This comprehensive guide will show you how to effectively use Python libraries and NLP concepts to solve various problems. You'll be introduced to natural language processing and its applications through examples and exercises. This will be followed by an introduction to the initial stages of solving a problem, which includes problem definition, getting text data, and preparing it for modeling. With exposure to concepts like advanced natural language processing algorithms and visualization techniques, you'll learn how to create applications that can extract information from unstructured data and present it as impactful visuals. Although you will continue to learn NLP-based techniques, the focus will gradually shift to developing useful applications. In these sections, you'll understand how to apply NLP techniques to answer questions as can be used in chatbots. By the end of this book, you'll be able to accomplish a varied range of assignments ranging from identifying the most suitable type of NLP task for solving a problem to using a tool like spacy or gensim for performing sentiment analysis. The book will easily equip you with the knowledge you need to build applications that interpret human language.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Introduction

To start with looking at NLP, let's understand what natural language is. In simple terms, it's the language we use to express ourselves. It's a basic means of communication. To define more specifically, language is a mutually agreed set of protocols involving words/sounds we use to communicate with each other.

In this era of digitization and computation, we tend to comprehend language scientifically. This is because we are constantly trying to make inanimate objects understand us. Thus, it has become essential to develop mechanisms by which language can be fed to inanimate objects such as computers. NLP helps us do this.

Let's look at an example. You must have some emails in your mailbox that have been automatically labeled as spam. This is done with the help of NLP. Here, an inanimate object – the email service – analyzes the content of the emails, comprehends it, and then further decides whether these emails need to be marked as spam or not.