June 2020
Beginner to intermediate
456 pages
13h 6m
English
book
Practical Natural Language Processing
by Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, Harshit Surana
Content preview from Practical Natural Language Processing
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Chapter 1. NLP: A Primer
A language is not just words. It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.
Noam Chomsky
Imagine a hypothetical person, John Doe. He’s the CTO of a fast-growing technology startup. On a busy day, John wakes up and has this conversation with his digital assistant:
John: “How is the weather today?”
Digital assistant: “It is 37 degrees centigrade outside with no rain today.”
John: “What does my schedule look like?”
Digital assistant: “You have a strategy meeting at 4 p.m. and an all-hands at 5:30 p.m. Based on today’s traffic situation, it is recommended you leave for the office by 8:15 a.m.”
While he’s getting dressed, John probes the assistant on his fashion choices:
John: “What should I wear today?”
Digital assistant: “White seems like a good choice.”
You might have used smart assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or Apple Siri to do similar things. We talk to these assistants not in a programming language, but in our natural language—the language we all communicate in. This natural language has been the primary medium of communication between humans since time immemorial. But computers can only process data in binary, i.e., 0s and 1s. While we can represent language data in binary, how do we make machines understand the language? This is where natural language processing (NLP) comes in. It is an area of computer science that deals with methods to ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.