Foundational Python for Data Science

12

Natural Language Toolkit

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten.

Thomas Sowell

In This Chapter

• Introduction to the NLTK package

• Accessing and loading sample texts

• Using frequency distributions

• Text objects

• Classifying text

Using a computer to derive insights into text is incredibly useful. The subset of data science that addresses deriving insights into text is called natural language processing. The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a Python package for all things language processing. This chapter takes a quick look at this powerful package.

NLTK Sample Texts

The NLTK package offers sample texts from many sources that you can ...