Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook [Paperback]

Jacob Perkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1849513600 | ISBN-13: 978-1849513609

Use Python's NLTK suite of libraries to maximize your Natural Language Processing capabilities. * Quickly get to grips with Natural Language Processing ? with Text Analysis, Text Mining, and beyond * Learn how machines and crawlers interpret and process natural languages * Easily work with huge amounts of data and learn how to handle distributed processing * Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible In Detail Natural Language Processing is used everywhere ? in search engines, spell checkers, mobile phones, computer games ? even your washing machine. Python's Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) suite of libraries has rapidly emerged as one of the most efficient tools for Natural Language Processing. You want to employ nothing less than the best techniques in Natural Language Processing ? and this book is your answer. Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook is your handy and illustrative guide, which will walk you through all the Natural Language Processing techniques in a step?by-step manner. It will demystify the advanced features of text analysis and text mining using the comprehensive NLTK suite. This book cuts short the preamble and you dive right into the science of text processing with a practical hands-on approach. Get started off with learning tokenization of text. Get an overview of WordNet and how to use it. Learn the basics as well as advanced features of Stemming and Lemmatization. Discover various ways to replace words with simpler and more common (read: more searched) variants. Create your own corpora and learn to create custom corpus readers for JSON files as well as for data stored in MongoDB. Use and manipulate POS taggers. Transform and normalize parsed chunks to produce a canonical form without changing their meaning. Dig into feature extraction and text classification. Learn how to easily handle huge amounts of data without any loss in efficiency or speed. This book will teach you all that and beyond, in a hands-on learn-by-doing manner. Make yourself an expert in using the NLTK for Natural Language Processing with this handy companion. What you will learn from this book * Learn Text categorization and Topic identification * Learn Stemming and Lemmatization and how to go beyond the usual spell checker * Replace negations with antonyms in your text * Learn to tokenize words into lists of sentences and words, and gain an insight into WordNet * Transform and manipulate chunks and trees * Learn advanced features of corpus readers and create your own custom corpora * Tag different parts of speech by creating, training, and using a part-of-speech tagger * Improve accuracy by combining multiple part-of-speech taggers * Learn how to do partial parsing to extract small chunks of text from a part-of-speech tagged sentence * Produce an alternative canonical form without changing the meaning by normalizing parsed chunks * Learn how search engines use Natural Language Processing to process text * Make your site more discoverable by learning how to automatically replace words with more searched equivalents * Parse dates, times, and HTML * Train and manipulate different types of classifiers Approach The learn-by-doing approach of this book will enable you to dive right into the heart of text processing from the very first page. Each recipe is carefully designed to fulfill your appetite for Natural Language Processing. Packed with numerous illustrative examples and code samples, it will make the task of using the NLTK for Natural Language Processing easy and straightforward. Who this book is written for This book is for Python programmers who want to quickly get to grips with using the NLTK for Natural Language Processing. Familiarity with basic text processing concepts is required. Programmers experienced in the NLTK will also find it useful. Students of linguistics will find it invaluable.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Overall the book is easy to read, has a huge set of sample recipes and feels very useful --Ian Ozsvald

About the Author

Jacob Perkins

Jacob Perkins has been an avid user of open source software since high school, when he first built his own computer and didn't want to pay for Windows. At one point he had 5 operating systems installed, including RedHat Linux, OpenBSD, and BeOS.

While at Washington University in St. Louis, Jacob took classes in Spanish, poetry writing, and worked on an independent study project that eventually became his Master's Project: WUGLE - a GUI for manipulating logical expressions. In his free time, he wrote the Gnome2 version of Seahorse (a GUI for encryption and key management), which has since been translated into over a dozen languages and is included in the default Gnome distribution.

After getting his MS in Computer Science, Jacob tried to start a web development studio with some friends, but since no-one knew anything about web development, it didn't work out as planned. Once he'd actually learned web development, he went off and co-founded another company called Weotta, which sparked his interest in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.This book is a synthesis of his knowledge on processing text using Python, NLTK, and more.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (November 11, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1849513600
• ISBN-13: 978-1849513609
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #292,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #19 in Books > Computers & Technology > Software > Natural Language Processing

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Easier to implement than "Natural Language Processing with Python" March 15, 2012

By hellopenguin

Format:Paperback

I've been coding in perl for more than 10 years, and recently picked up python to do natural language processing. So I am new to both python and NLTK. I started off with the popular "Natural Language Processing with Python" by Bird, Klein, and Loper. I found it hard to follow because the dots were not connected. In that book, I'd read an example, and I *thought* I understood it, but coding it was a different story because there was no transition between the different sections. So I had to go to github to find random sample code using the tools I was interested in.

Then I picked up NLTK 2.0 Cookbook. It doesn't spend much time explaining concepts, but I find I can type the code in pretty much word-for-word (and replace it with my customized needs), and the code works. I find it much more useful, and faster to code using this book as a template. It's limited in the recipes it gives, but provides the main NLTK recipes, so I'm quite happy with it.

Since I had already picked up the Bird book, I knew exactly which recipes I needed. If you don't know which chapters are pertinent to your needs, I could see it being difficult to know which recipes to use because there's not much explanation and the terminology is different if you're new to natural language processing. The terminology and concepts are better explained in the Bird book.

A good book. Worth checking out some sample pages on Amazon to see if the recipes will be useful to you, and if you're finding difficulty implementing what's in the Bird book, this one provides better instructions.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful examples December 24, 2012

By Crabby Techie

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I've been working my way through the book as I build a pipeline for tagging & classifying text. The examples are straightforward and useful. It's a good collection of the most common tasks you'll need to do with NLTK.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Very practical book December 6, 2011

By Junling Hu

Format:Paperback

I found this book to be clear and very well written. All the examples are easy to follow, and the code are ready to use. It is a very practical book. I really want to thank the authors to put all the information together. It's an invaluable service.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book on text processing April 22, 2013

By JoeT

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

First off, you better have some idea on how to run python. I use pearl and php regularly and had only a smattering of python knowledge, so the setup was not cookbook. Once I got past that, the code on the supplied CD worked as advertised. Good intro to text processing. However, if you want to understand what's really going on, you will need to understand python code in depth, in my opinion.

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but needs errata September 28, 2012

By Gsleeper

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Lots of good ideas for examples but the actual listings miss. There are bugs - perhaps due to version differences that errata would help. Also, listings are not standalone so sometimes require searching backward for functions defined earlier in the book.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars And what do I do know? May 29, 2012

By J. Schmuecker

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

The book is more a description of the API than a book introducing one to text processing and what you can actually do with it. So if you need a reference book with some samples this might be the right buy. If you want to learn and understand what you can do with NLTK and how to apply the functionality, forget this book.