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Description
This book offers a highly accessible introduction to Natural Language Processing, the field that underpins a variety of language technologies ranging from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. You'll learn how to write Python programs to analyze the structure and meaning of texts, drawing on techniques from the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence.
Full Description
Table of Contents
  1. Chapter 1 Language Processing and Python

    1. Computing with Language: Texts and Words

    2. A Closer Look at Python: Texts as Lists of Words

    3. Computing with Language: Simple Statistics

    4. Back to Python: Making Decisions and Taking Control

    5. Automatic Natural Language Understanding

    6. Summary

    7. Further Reading

    8. Exercises

  2. Chapter 2 Accessing Text Corpora and Lexical Resources

    1. Accessing Text Corpora

    2. Conditional Frequency Distributions

    3. More Python: Reusing Code

    4. Lexical Resources

    5. WordNet

    6. Summary

    7. Further Reading

    8. Exercises

  3. Chapter 3 Processing Raw Text

    1. Accessing Text from the Web and from Disk

    2. Strings: Text Processing at the Lowest Level

    3. Text Processing with Unicode

    4. Regular Expressions for Detecting Word Patterns

    5. Useful Applications of Regular Expressions

    6. Normalizing Text

    7. Regular Expressions for Tokenizing Text

    8. Segmentation

    9. Formatting: From Lists to Strings

    10. Summary

    11. Further Reading

    12. Exercises

  4. Chapter 4 Writing Structured Programs

    1. Back to the Basics

    2. Sequences

    3. Questions of Style

    4. Functions: The Foundation of Structured Programming

    5. Doing More with Functions

    6. Program Development

    7. Algorithm Design

    8. A Sample of Python Libraries

    9. Summary

    10. Further Reading

    11. Exercises

  5. Chapter 5 Categorizing and Tagging Words

    1. Using a Tagger

    2. Tagged Corpora

    3. Mapping Words to Properties Using Python Dictionaries

    4. Automatic Tagging

    5. N-Gram Tagging

    6. Transformation-Based Tagging

    7. How to Determine the Category of a Word

    8. Summary

    9. Further Reading

    10. Exercises

  6. Chapter 6 Learning to Classify Text

    1. Supervised Classification

    2. Further Examples of Supervised Classification

    3. Evaluation

    4. Decision Trees

    5. Naive Bayes Classifiers

    6. Maximum Entropy Classifiers

    7. Modeling Linguistic Patterns

    8. Summary

    9. Further Reading

    10. Exercises

  7. Chapter 7 Extracting Information from Text

    1. Information Extraction

    2. Chunking

    3. Developing and Evaluating Chunkers

    4. Recursion in Linguistic Structure

    5. Named Entity Recognition

    6. Relation Extraction

    7. Summary

    8. Further Reading

    9. Exercises

  8. Chapter 8 Analyzing Sentence Structure

    1. Some Grammatical Dilemmas

    2. What’s the Use of Syntax?

    3. Context-Free Grammar

    4. Parsing with Context-Free Grammar

    5. Dependencies and Dependency Grammar

    6. Grammar Development

    7. Summary

    8. Further Reading

    9. Exercises

  9. Chapter 9 Building Feature-Based Grammars

    1. Grammatical Features

    2. Processing Feature Structures

    3. Extending a Feature-Based Grammar

    4. Summary

    5. Further Reading

    6. Exercises

  10. Chapter 10 Analyzing the Meaning of Sentences

    1. Natural Language Understanding

    2. Propositional Logic

    3. First-Order Logic

    4. The Semantics of English Sentences

    5. Discourse Semantics

    6. Summary

    7. Further Reading

    8. Exercises

  11. Chapter 11 Managing Linguistic Data

    1. Corpus Structure: A Case Study

    2. The Life Cycle of a Corpus

    3. Acquiring Data

    4. Working with XML

    5. Working with Toolbox Data

    6. Describing Language Resources Using OLAC Metadata

    7. Summary

    8. Further Reading

    9. Exercises

  1. Appendix Afterword: The Language Challenge

    1. Language Processing Versus Symbol Processing

    2. Contemporary Philosophical Divides

    3. NLTK Roadmap

    4. Envoi...

  2. Appendix Bibliography

  3. NLTK Index

  4. General Index

  5. Colophon

View Full Table of Contents
Product Details
Title:
Natural Language Processing with Python
By:
Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper
Publisher:
O'Reilly Media
Formats:
  • Print
  • Ebook
  • Safari Books Online
Print Release:
June 2009
Ebook Release:
June 2009
Pages:
512
Print ISBN:
978-0-596-51649-9
| ISBN 10:
0-596-51649-5
Ebook ISBN:
978-0-596-80339-1
| ISBN 10:
0-596-80339-7
Customer Reviews
About the Authors
  1. Steven Bird

    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. He completed a PhD on computational phonology at the University of Edinburgh in 1990, supervised by Ewan Klein. He later moved to Cameroon to conduct linguistic fieldwork on the Grassfields Bantu languages under the auspices of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. More recently, he spent several years as Associate Director of the Linguistic Data Consortium where he led an R&D team to create models and tools for large databases of annotated text. At Melbourne University, he established a language technology research group and has taught at all levels of the undergraduate computer science curriculum. In 2009, Steven is President of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

    View Steven Bird's full profile page.

  2. Ewan Klein

    Ewan Klein is Professor of Language Technology in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He completed a PhD on formal semantics at the University of Cambridge in 1978. After some years working at the Universities of Sussex and Newcastle upon Tyne, Ewan took up a teaching position at Edinburgh. He was involved in the establishment of Edinburgh's Language Technology Group in 1993, and has been closely associated with it ever since. From 2000-2002, he took leave from the University to act as Research Manager for the Edinburgh-based Natural Language Research Group of Edify Corporation, Santa Clara, and was responsible for spoken dialogue processing. Ewan is a past President of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and was a founding member and Coordinator of the European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies (ELSNET).

    View Ewan Klein's full profile page.

  3. Edward Loper

    Edward Loper has recently completed a PhD on machine learning for natural language processing at the the University of Pennsylvania. Edward was a student in Steven's graduate course on computational linguistics in the fall of 2000, and went on to be a TA and share in the development of NLTK. In addition to NLTK, he has helped develop two packages for documenting and testing Python software, epydoc, and doctest.

    View Edward Loper's full profile page.

Colophon
The animal on the cover of Natural Language Processing with Python is a right whale, the rarest of all large whales. It is identifiable by its enormous head, which can measure up to one-third of its total body length. It lives in temperate and cool seas in both hemispheres at the surface of the ocean. It's believed that the right whale may have gotten its name from whalers who thought that it was the "right" whale to kill for oil. Even though it has been protected since the 1930s, the right whale is still the most endangered of all the great whales.The large and bulky right whale is easily distinguished from other whales by the calluses on its head. It has a broad back without a dorsal fin and a long arching mouth that begins above the eye. Its body is black, except for a white patch on its belly. Wounds and scars may appear bright orange, often becoming infested with whale lice or cyamids. The calluses-which are also found near the blowholes, above the eyes, and on the chin, and upper lip-are black or gray. It has large flippers that are shaped like paddles, and a distinctive V-shaped blow, caused by the widely spaced blowholes on the top of its head, which rises to 16 feet above the ocean's surface.The right whale feeds on planktonic organisms, including shrimp-like krill and copepods. As baleen whales, they have a series of 225-250 fringed overlapping plates hanging from each side of the upper jaw, where teeth would otherwise be located. The plates are black and can be as long as 7.2 feet. Right whales are "grazers of the sea," often swimming slowly with their mouths open. As water flows into the mouth and through the baleen, prey is trapped near the tongue.Because females are not sexually mature until 10 years of age and they give birth to a single calf after a year-long pregnancy, populations grow slowly. The young right whale stays with its mother for one year.Right whales are found worldwide but in very small numbers. A right whale is commonly found alone or in small groups of 1 to 3, but when courting, they may form groups of up to 30. Like most baleen whales, they are seasonally migratory. They inhabit colder waters for feeding and then migrate to warmer waters for breeding and calving. Although they may move far out to sea during feeding seasons, right whales give birth in coastal areas. Interestingly, many of the females do not return to these coastal breeding areas every year, but visit the area only in calving years. Where they go in other years remains a mysteryThe right whale's only predators are orcas and humans. When danger lurks, a group of right whales may come together in a circle, with their tails pointing outward, to deter a predator. This defense is not always successful and calves are occasionally separated from their mother and killed.Right whales are among the slowest swimming whales, although they may reach speeds up to 10 mph in short spurts. They can dive to at least 1,000 feet and can stay submerged for up to 40 minutes. The right whale is extremely endangered, even after years of protected status. Only in the past 15 years is there evidence of a population recovery in the Southern Hemisphere, and it is still not known if the right whale will survive at all in the Northern Hemisphere. Although not presently hunted, current conservation problems include collisions with ships, conflicts with fishing activities, habitat destruction, oil drilling, and possible competition from other whale species. Right whales have no teeth, so ear bones and, in some cases, eye lenses can be used to estimate the age of a right whale at death. It is believed that right whales live at least 50 years, but there is little data on their longevity.
  • Book cover of Natural Language Processing with Python