Welcome

Thank you for supporting Natural Language Processing in Action - 2nd edition with your purchase of the MEAP.

Natural Language Processing may be the fastest-developing and most important field of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. If you want to change the world you will need to understand how machines read and process natural language text. That’s what we hope to do with this latest edition of this book. We are going to show you how to change the world for the better using prosocial Natural Language Processing. This book will show you how to build machines that understand and generate text almost as well as a human, in many situations.

Immediately after the first edition of NLPiA was published, we started seeing the technologies we used in it become outdated. Faster more powerful algorithms and more prosocial applications for NLP were being released each year. BERT was released in 2019 and then GPT-3 in 2020. Inspired by a renewed sense of urgency the ethical AI and open source AI community quickly released GPT-J (GPT-J-6B) in responded to less-than-prosocial applications of the proprietary GPT-3 and Codex models. These ground-breaking models are based on the Transformer architecture, so we’ve added an entire chapter to help democratize utilization and understanding of this powerful technology.