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

Collecting Data by Scraping Web Pages

The basic building block of any web page is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)—a markup language that specifies the structure of your content. HTML is written using a series of tags, combined with optional content. The content encompassed within HTML tags defines the appearance of the web page. It can be used to make words bold or italicize them, to add hyperlinks to the text, and even to add images. Additional information can be added to the element using attributes within tags. So, a web page can be considered to be a document written using HTML. Thus, we need to know the basics of HTML to scrape web pages effectively.

The following figure depicts the contents that are included within an HTML tag:

Figure 4.1: Tags and attributes of HTML

As you can see in the preceding figure, we can easily identify different elements within an HTML tag. The basic HTML structure and commonly used tags are shown and explained as...