Real-World Natural Language Processing

1 Introduction to natural language processing

This chapter covers

• What natural language processing (NLP) is, what it is not, and why it’s such an interesting, yet challenging, field
• How NLP relates to other fields, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
• What typical NLP applications and tasks are
• How a typical NLP application is developed and structured

This is not an introductory book to machine learning or deep learning. You won’t learn how to write neural networks in mathematical terms or how to compute gradients, for example. But don’t worry, even if you don’t have any idea what they are. I’ll explain those concepts as needed, not mathematically but conceptually. In fact, this book contains no mathematical formulae—not ...