front matter
Thank you for choosing Getting Started with Natural Language Processing. I am very excited that you decided to learn about natural language processing (NLP) with the help of this book, and I hope that you’ll enjoy getting started with NLP following this material and the examples.
Natural language processing addresses various types of tasks related to language and processing of information expressed in human language. The field and techniques have been around for quite a long time, and they are well integrated into our everyday lives; in fact, you are probably benefiting from NLP on a daily basis without realizing it. Therefore, I can’t really overemphasize the importance and the impact that this technology has on our lives. The first chapter of this book will give you an overview of the wide scope of NLP applications that you might be using regularly—from internet search engines to spam filters to predictive keyboards (and many more!), and the rest the book will help you to implement many of these applications from scratch yourself.