Book Image

The Natural Language Processing Workshop

By : Rohan Chopra, Aniruddha M. Godbole, Nipun Sadvilkar, Muzaffar Bashir Shah, Sohom Ghosh, Dwight Gunning
5 (1)
Book Image

The Natural Language Processing Workshop

5 (1)
By: Rohan Chopra, Aniruddha M. Godbole, Nipun Sadvilkar, Muzaffar Bashir Shah, Sohom Ghosh, Dwight Gunning

Overview of this book

Do you want to learn how to communicate with computer systems using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, or make a machine understand human sentiments? Do you want to build applications like Siri, Alexa, or chatbots, even if you’ve never done it before? With The Natural Language Processing Workshop, you can expect to make consistent progress as a beginner, and get up to speed in an interactive way, with the help of hands-on activities and fun exercises. The book starts with an introduction to NLP. You’ll study different approaches to NLP tasks, and perform exercises in Python to understand the process of preparing datasets for NLP models. Next, you’ll use advanced NLP algorithms and visualization techniques to collect datasets from open websites, and to summarize and generate random text from a document. In the final chapters, you’ll use NLP to create a chatbot that detects positive or negative sentiment in text documents such as movie reviews. By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with the essential NLP tools and techniques you need to solve common business problems that involve processing text.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
Preface

Types of Data

To deal with data effectively, we need to understand the various forms in which it exists. First, let's explore the types of data that exist. There are two main ways to categorize data (by structure and by content), as explained in the upcoming sections.

Categorizing Data Based on Structure

Data can be divided on the basis of structure into three categories, namely, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, as shown in the following diagram:

Figure 2.1: Categorization based on content

These three categories are as follows:

  • Structured data: This is the most organized form of data. It is represented in tabular formats such as Excel files and Comma-Separated Value (CSV) files. The following image shows what structured data usually looks like:

Figure 2.2: Structured data

The preceding table contains information about five people, with each row representing a person and each column representing one of their attributes...