Thank you for joining the MEAP for Essential Natural Language Processing: A friendly introduction using Python. I am very excited that you selected this book and I hope that you'll enjoy getting started with Natural Language Processing using it!

Natural Language Processing (or NLP for short) addresses all types of tasks related to language and information. The field and techniques have been around for some time now: in fact, you might have been using Natural Language Processing in your everyday life without realising that! Therefore, the very first chapter will give you an overview of the wide scope of NLP applications that you might be using regularly – from the Internet search engines to spam filters to predictive keyboards (and many more!)

welcome