Sebastopol, CA—The term natural language refers to language that is used for everyday communication by humans: languages such as 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.
Technologies based on Natural Language Processing, or NLP, are becoming increasingly widespread. In Natural Language Processing with Python (O'Reilly, US $44.99), authors Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper offer a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. Readers will learn how to write Python programs to work with large collections of unstructured text. You'll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structures, and you'll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication.
Packed with examples and exercises, Natural Language Processing with Python will help you:
- Extract information from unstructured text, either to guess the topic or to identify "named entities"
- Analyze linguistic structure in text, including parsing and semantic analysis
- Access popular linguistic databases, including WordNet and treebanks
- Integrate techniques drawn from fields as diverse as linguistics and artificial intelligence
This book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you're interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or documenting endangered languages—or if you're simply curious to have a programmer's perspective on how human language works—you'll find Natural Language Processing with Python both fascinating and immensely useful.
For a review copy or more information please email kathrynb@oreilly.com Please include your delivery address and contact information.
Steven Bird is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne, and Senior Research Associate in the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania.
Ewan Klein is Professor of Language Technology in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Edward Loper has recently completed a PhD on machine learning for natural language processing at the the University of Pennsylvania. He has helped develop two packages for documenting and testing Python software, epydoc, and doctest.
Additional Resources:
For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596516499
Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper
ISBN: 9780596516499, 502 pages,
Book Price: $44.99 USD, £30.99 GBP
Ebook Price: $35.99 USD
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