1 Introduction

Natural language processing (or NLP) is a field that addresses various ways in which computers can deal with natural—that is, human—language. Regardless of your occupation or background, there is a good chance you have heard about NLP before, especially in recent years with the media covering the impressive capabilities of intelligent machines that can understand and produce natural language. This is what has brought NLP into the spotlight, and what might have attracted you to this book. You might be a programmer who wants to learn new skills, a machine learning or data science practitioner who realizes there is a lot of potential in processing natural language, or you might be generally interested in how language works and how to process it automatically. Either way, welcome to NLP! This book aims to help you get started with it.

1.1 A brief history of NLP

1.2 Typical tasks

1.2.1 Information search

1.2.2 Advanced information search: Asking the machine precise questions

1.2.3 Conversational agents and intelligent virtual assistants

1.2.4 Text prediction and language generation

1.2.5 Spam filtering

1.2.6 Machine translation

1.2.7 Spell- and grammar checking

Summary

Solution to exercise 1.1