Natural Language Processing Fundamentals

Book excerpt: Use Python and NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) to build out your own text classifiers and solve common NLP problems. Key FeaturesAssimilate key NLP concepts and terminologies Explore popular NLP tools and techniquesGain practical experience using NLP in application codeBook Description 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. What you will learnObtain, verify, and clean data before transforming it into a correct format for usePerform data analysis and machine learning tasks using PythonUnderstand the basics of computational linguisticsBuild models for general natural language processing tasksEvaluate the performance of a model with the right metricsVisualize, quantify, and perform exploratory analysis from any text dataWho this book is for Natural Language Processing Fundamentals is designed for novice and mid-level data scientists and machine learning developers who want to gather and analyze text data to build an NLP-powered product. It'll help you to have prior experience of coding in Python using data types, writing functions, and importing libraries. Some experience with linguistics and probability is useful but not necessary.