Natural Language Processing for Hackers

about the technology

Thanks to NLP, computers are capable of highly accurate text and speech-based interaction with humans. NLP capitalizes on powerful machine learning techniques that can detect patterns and extract meaning from human-generated text. As well as improving raw data processing, NLP technology is behind cutting edge UI developments such as chatbots and voice assistants that can process written and spoken commands and generate realistic and helpful responses.

about the book

Natural Language Processing for Hackers covers NLP end-to-end, giving you the skills and techniques that allow your computers to speak human. Unlike many research-oriented books that use the kind of clean datasets you would never find in the real world, this practical guide takes on NLP as you’ll actually use it. You’ll learn the key concepts of NLP by coding your own tools and projects, from a text analysis service right up to a full-featured chatbot. Everything is written in concise, easy-to-read Python code to ensure you’ll grok the most important aspects of Natural Language Processing. When you’re done, you will be able to apply the complete range of NLP techniques to build practical applications—even with messy real-world data.

what's inside

• Constructing your own Text Analysis engine
• Building a Twitter listener that performs Sentiment Analysis on a certain subject
• Assembling your own NLP toolbox, complete with Part Of Speech Tagger, Shallow Parser, Named Entity Extractor, and Dependency Parsers
• Cleaning and standardising messy datasets

about the reader

This book requires familiarity with Python, but no prior knowledge of natural language processing or machine learning is necessary.

about the author

George-Bogdan Ivanov is a software engineer with an MSc. in AI and a soft spot for applying Natural Language Processing to practical problems. He loves being part of and building startups and small businesses in general. Among other projects he is the creator of Textera.ro, a Natural Language Processing API for the Romanian Language.