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)

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned about various types of data and ways to deal with unstructured text data. Text data is usually untidy and needs to be cleaned and pre-processed. Pre-processing steps mainly consist of tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, and stop-word removal. After pre-processing, features are extracted from texts using various methods, such as BoW and TF-IDF. This step converts unstructured text data into structured numeric data. New features are created from existing features using a technique called feature engineering. In the last part of the chapter, we explored various ways of visualizing text data, such as word clouds.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to develop machine learning models to classify texts using the features you have learned to extract in this chapter. Moreover, different sampling techniques and model evaluation parameters will be introduced.