Fundamentals of NLP: Introducing Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on programmatically working with text or speech – the term ænaturalÆ here emphasizes that the program must work with and be aware of everyday language grammar and semantics rather than structured text data such as might be found in database or string processing. In this course you will learn about the two mAIn branches of NLP natural language understanding and natural language generation. You will also explore the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and spaCy two popular Python libraries for natural language processing and analysis. Next you will delve into common preprocessing steps for natural language data. This includes cleaning and tokenizing data removing stopwords from your text performing stemming and lemmatization part-of-speech (POS) tagging and named entity recognition (NER). Finally you will get set up with your Python environment and libraries for NLP and explore some text corpora that NLTK offers for working with text.