This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. With it, you'll learn how to write Python programs that work with large collections of unstructured text. You'll access richly annotated datasets using a comprehensive range of linguistic data structuresand you'll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication.

Packed with examples and exercises, Natural Language Processing with Python will help you:

Extract information from unstructured text, either to guess the topic or identify "named entities"
Analyze linguistic structure in text, including parsing and semantic analysis
Access popular linguistic databases, including WordNet and treebanks
Integrate techniques drawn from fields as diverse as linguistics and artificial intelligence
This book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you're interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sourcesor documenting endangered languages -- or if you're simply curious to have a programmer's perspective on how human language works -- you'll find Natural Language Processing with Python both fascinating and immensely useful.

includes bibliography and index.

Language processing and Python
Accessing text corpora and lexical resources
Processing raw text
Writing structured programs
Categorizing and tagging words
Learning to classify text
Extracting information from text
Analyzing sentence structure
Building feature-based grammars
Analyzing the meaning of sentences
Managing linguistic data
Afterword: The language challenge

This is an introduction to natural language processing, which supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation