What is NLP?

Natural language processing is the use of machines to manipulate natural language. In this book, we will focus on written language, or in simpler words: text.

In effect, this is a practitioner's guide to text processing in English.

Humans are the only known species to have developed written languages. Yet, children don't learn to read and write on their own. This is to highlight the complexity of text processing and NLP.

The study of natural language processing has been around for more than 50 years. The famous Turing test for general artificial intelligence uses this language. This field has grown both in regard to linguistics and its computational techniques.

In the spirit of being able to build things first, we will learn how to build a simple text classification system using Python's scikit-learn and no other dependencies.

We will also address if this book is a good pick for you.

Let's get going!