Python for Natural Language Processing

Abstract

In the previous chapter, we took a journey into the world of natural language processing and explored several interesting concepts and domains associated with it. We now have a better understanding of the entire scope surrounding natural language processing, linguistics, and text analytics. If you refresh your memory, we also got our first taste of running Python code to look at essentials with regard to processing and understanding text. We also looked at ways to access and use text corpora resources with the help of the NLTK framework. In this chapter, we look at why Python is the language of choice for natural language processing (NLP), set up a robust Python environment, take a hands-on based approach to understanding essentials of string and text processing, manipulation, and transformation, and conclude by looking at some of the important libraries and frameworks associated with NLP and text analytics. This chapter is aimed to provide a quick refresher for getting started with Python and NLP.