Part 1 Basics

Welcome to the beautiful and exciting world of natural language processing (NLP)! NLP is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that concerns computational approaches to processing, understanding, and generating human languages. NLP is used in many technologies you interact with in your daily life—spam filtering, conversational assistants, search engines, and machine translation. This first part of the book is intended to give you a gentle introduction to the field and bring you up to speed with how to build practical NLP applications.

In chapter 1, we’ll begin by introducing the “what” and “why” of NLP—what is NLP, what is not NLP, how NLP technologies are used, and how it’s related to other fields of AI.

In chapter 2, you’ll build a complete, working NLP application—a sentiment analyzer—within an hour with the help of a powerful NLP framework, AllenNLP. You’ll also learn to use basic machine learning (ML) concepts, including word embeddings and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Don’t worry if this sounds intimidating—we’ll introduce you to the concepts gradually and provide an intuitive explanation.

Chapter 3 provides a deep dive into the one of the most important concepts for deep learning approaches to NLP—word and sentence embeddings. The chapter demonstrates how to use and even train them using your own data.