Alex's Notes

Bird et al: The NLTK Book

Metadata

  • Title: Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit

  • Authors: Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper

  • Publication Year: 2021 (unpublished edition on website)

  • Publisher: self-published draft of unpublished 2nd edition

Abstract

This is a book about Natural Language Processing. By “natural language” we mean a language that is used for everyday communication by humans; languages like English, Hindi or Portuguese. In contrast to artificial languages such as programming languages and mathematical notations, natural languages have evolved as they pass from generation to generation, and are hard to pin down with explicit rules. We will take Natural Language Processing — or NLP for short — in a wide sense to cover any kind of computer manipulation of natural language. At one extreme, it could be as simple as counting word frequencies to compare different writing styles. At the other extreme, NLP involves “understanding” complete human utterances, at least to the extent of being able to give useful responses to them.

The book is available at the author’s page

Outline

  1. Language Processing and Python

  2. Accessing Text Corpora and Lexical Resources

  3. Processing Raw Text

  4. Writing Structured Programs (not noted)

  5. Categorizing and Tagging Words

  6. Learning to Classify Text

  7. NLTK Book Chapter 07: Information Extraction

Key Points

Key Quotes