Natural Language Processing with Python

Natural Language Processing with Python is a translated edition in the "Natural Language Processing with Python" series from Posts & Telecom Press; its Chinese title is Natural Language Processing with Python and NLTK. The book is co-authored by Nitin Hardeniya, Jacob Perkins, Deepti Chopra, Nisheeth Joshi, and Iti Mathur, and translated by Lin Ci. Using Python 3 and NLTK 3 as its main tools, it unfolds in three modules: Module 1 explains the preprocessing foundations of text mining and NLP tasks, including text organization and cleaning, sentence segmentation, tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, stop-word handling, spelling correction, part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition, syntactic and dependency parsing, and information extraction; Module 2 focuses on NLTK 3's text-processing capabilities, including creating custom corpora, tagging and replacing words, chunk extraction, and text classification; Module 3 further discusses statistical language models, word morphology, parsing, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, and information retrieval, stringing these techniques into implementable machine learning applications. The book is organized as "explanation + try it yourself," with code practice and summaries in each chapter, balancing understanding of principles with hands-on implementation; it suits NLP beginners and developers with Python foundations who want to systematically master the NLTK toolchain.