Applied Natural Language Processing in the Enterprise

Chapter 1. Introduction to NLP

What do you think your computer can do? Show you emails? Edit some files? Spin up an Excel sheet maybe?

But what if we told you your computer could read?

from transformers import pipeline
classifier = pipeline('sentiment-analysis')
classifier('I am reading the greatest NLP book ever!')

[{'label': 'POSITIVE', 'score': 0.9996862411499023}]

And write:

text_generator = pipeline("text-generation")
text_generator("Welcome to the ", max_length=5, do_sample=False)

And, most impressively, understand:

nlp = pipeline("question-answering")
context = """
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of linguistics,
computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the
interactions between computers and human language, in particular
how to program computers to process and analyze large amounts of
natural language data. The result is a computer capable of
"understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual
nuances of the language within them. The technology can then accurately
extract information and insights contained in the documents as well
as categorize and organize the documents themselves.
"""
nlp(question="What is NLP?", context=context)

{'score': 0.9869255423545837,
 'start': 1,
 'end': 28,
 'answer': 'Natural language processing'}

What was once the fantasy of a distant future is not only here but is accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. The ability to understand and communicate in natural language, one ...