Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit Paperback – 4 Aug. 2009

This book is intended for the use and instruction of NLTK, but it also provides a nice overview of some of the issues of processing natural language and explains some general methods used to deal with them. Further reading is also suggested and relevant extra materials are available online.

I have been using this book to help me with my final year project on text mining in a Computer Science course, and I love it! It was overwhelming at first because I was brand new to Python and natural language processing, but after I learnt a bit more about the topics the book became very helpful for me and I use it almost every day at the moment.

Edward Loper's book is an introduction to the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) for the Python programming language. Its target audience is a narrow one. It assumes a working familiarity with Python. It's true that an experienced programmer could learn Python along the way, but getting the most from the code examples and walkthrough explanations requires enough familiarity to "think" in Python. The book also assumes sufficient familiarity with Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand why one would want to build lexicons, grammars, and parsers.The book has several strengths. It is tightly integrated with Python and NLTK code. There are numerous examples throughout and the author walks through and modifies them to clarify how the NLTK works. The sizeable reference sections at the end of each chapter are also valuable. These sections include both introductory and advanced sources. And a lot of them. There is also useful integration with the NLTK web site which provides and points to additional resources.Not to be missed are the end-of-chapter questions. Readers have come to expect little from these learning aids; they usually invite us to parrot back a small number of key concepts or try a few calculations or code segments. This book's questions go far beyond the norm. They introduce new concepts, encourage writing and comparing several versions of a program, and otherwise extend each chapter's contents. Even readers who don't plan to complete these exercises should read them closely.Weaknesses are few. As noted, the book may assume too much Python and NLP background for some users. It does have a narrow focus and is not organized the right way to be used as a reference book. Readers who want something a little more modular and reference-like might prefer Jacob Perkins' Python 3 Text Processing with NLTK 3 Cookbook. David Mertz's Text Processing in Python is an older source, but still useful as well.

good book

I am very disappointed in this book as my motive was to do practical things with NLP; I found that the book is written from a student learning point of view and its hard to see how things tie together unless you read lots of irrelevant details. It would have been helpful if the authors wrote this book less from a pov of cool stuff that NLP can do and more from a point of view of how to engineer and architect useful NLP pipelines to do real-life awesome stuff. An average reference guide for nltk python package none-the-less

Very good book to introduce Language engineering. Strats by assuming no programming knowledge and ramps up easily. Later chapters are a bit hard and require more provate study but on the whole very recommended to have book for Lang Engineering

Excellent!

Natural Language Processing with Python has to have one of the most intimidating pre-ambles of any book I've picked up. Not only does it set out to cover Natural Language Processing, using the author's own Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) as the teaching tool, but also teach the basics of Python and good programming techniques. After reading this I put the book aside for a day while I lay down in a darkened room to gather my strength!Having now worked my way through the book, lets take a look at how well it stands up to it's claims. Bad news first. The coverage of Python really didn't work for me, though I admit that this may be due to my background as a procedural rather than object oriented programmer. Without additional Python resources I was seriously struggling so if you are a complete Python and OO neophyte like me then I would strongly suggest working through either a good Python book or one of the many online tutorials before you attempt to tackle Natural Language Processing with Python. The other main problem was the amount of information that the book tries to cover. I found it helpful to scan read the book to get it into some sort of order in my mind before reading it any depth.If I do have any other criticism of Natural Language Processing with Python, it's probably that it could probably be more accurately titled something like "Natural Language Toolkit: The Missing Manual".Right that's the bad news out of the way, now for the good. The actual coverage of NLTK and, to a slightly lesser degree, natural language processing is excellent. The theme of the book is very pragmatic and task centred, so if you have a specific problem in mind which you feel needs a natural language approach then this book could well be the answer to your prayers. On the other hand if you are looking for a more theoretical overview of the subject you may be slightly disappointed. Natural Language Processing with Python certainly covers pretty much all the bases from comparatively simple statistical analysis, through context free grammar parsing and text classification all the way to discourse analysis. OK, some may complain that it's a bit code heavy and theory light but, when you consider that pretty much every chapter in the book has had several large tomes dedicated you can see what an achievement this book is.In summary; if you have a particular problem that you want to use NLTK for but can't get your head round either the problem or the software buy Natural Language Processing with Python now - your frontal lobes will thank you forever. If you are interested in the field, and especially if you come from a pragmatic viewpoint or are already a Python hacker then you certainly won't be wasting your time or money. If you are terrified by the concept of programming and want an overview of the theory of linguistic analysis then there are probably better books for you out there.