To date, there are a lot of books out there about Natural Language Processing that you could learn from. However, choosing the right book for yourself might be intimidating since there is just so much! This post provides a list of the top books I personally recommend to…
Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit
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 structures, and you’ll understand the main algorithms for analyzing the content and structure of written communication.
This book will help you gain practical skills in natural language processing using the Python programming Books language and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) open source library. If you’re interested in developing web applications, analyzing multilingual news sources, or 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.
- 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
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Practical Natural Language Processing: A Comprehensive Guide to Building Real-World NLP Systems
Many books and courses tackle natural language processing (NLP) problems with toy use cases and well-defined datasets. But if you want to build, iterate, and scale NLP systems in a business setting and tailor them for particular industry verticals, this is your guide. Software engineers and data scientists will learn how to navigate the maze of options available at each step of the journey.
Through the course of the book, authors Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, and Harshit Surana will guide you through the process of building real-world NLP solutions embedded in larger product setups. You’ll learn how to adapt your solutions for different industry verticals such as healthcare, social media, and retail.
- Understand the wide spectrum of problem statements, tasks, and solution approaches within NLP
- Implement and evaluate different NLP applications using machine learning and deep learning methods
- Fine-tune your NLP solution based on your business problem and industry vertical
- Evaluate various algorithms and approaches for NLP product tasks, datasets, and stages
- Produce software solutions following best practices around release, deployment, and DevOps for NLP systems
- Understand best practices, opportunities, and the roadmap for NLP from a business and product leader’s perspective
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Introduction to Natural Language Processing (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning series)
A survey of computational methods for understanding, generating, and manipulating human language, which offers a synthesis of classical representations and algorithms with contemporary machine learning techniques.
This textbook provides a technical perspective on natural language processing—methods for building computer software that understands, generates, and manipulates human language. It emphasizes contemporary data-driven approaches, focusing on techniques from supervised and unsupervised machine learning.
The first section establishes a foundation in machine learning by building a set of tools that will be used throughout the book and applying them to word-based textual analysis.
The second section introduces structured representations of language, including sequences, trees, and graphs. The third section explores different approaches to the representation and analysis of linguistic meaning, ranging from formal logic to neural word embeddings.
The final section offers chapter-length treatments of three transformative applications of natural language processing: information extraction, machine translation, and text generation. End-of-chapter exercises include both paper-and-pencil analysis and software implementation.
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Natural Language Processing in Action: Understanding, analyzing, and generating text with Python
Natural Language Processing in Action is your guide to creating machines that understand human language using the power of Python with its ecosystem of packages dedicated to NLP and AI.
In it, you’ll use readily available Python packages to capture the meaning in text and react accordingly. The book expands traditional NLP approaches to include neural networks, modern deep learning algorithms, and generative techniques as you tackle real-world problems like extracting dates and names, composing text, and answering free-form questions.
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Advanced Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow 2: Build effective real-world NLP applications using NER, RNNs, seq2seq models, Transformers, and more
This book comes with a perfect blend of both the theoretical and practical aspects of trending and complex NLP techniques.
The book is focused on innovative applications in the field of NLP, language generation, and dialogue systems. It helps you apply the concepts of pre-processing text using techniques such as tokenization, parts of speech tagging, and lemmatization using popular libraries such as Stanford NLP and SpaCy. You will build Named Entity Recognition (NER) from scratch using Conditional Random Fields and Viterbi Decoding on top of RNNs.
The book covers key emerging areas such as generating text for use in sentence completion and text summarization, bridging images and text by generating captions for images, and managing dialogue aspects of chatbots. You will learn how to apply transfer learning and fine-tuning using TensorFlow 2.
Further, it covers practical techniques that can simplify the labelling of textual data. The book also has a working code that is adaptable to your use cases for each tech piece.
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Getting Started with Natural Language Processing
Getting Started with Natural Language Processing is a hands-on guide filled with everything you need to get started with NLP in a friendly, understandable tutorial. Full of Python code and hands-on projects, each chapter provides a concrete example with practical techniques that you can put into practice right away.
By following the numerous Python-based examples and real-world case studies, you’ll apply NLP to search applications, extracting meaning from text, sentiment analysis, user profiling, and more. When you’re done, you’ll have a solid grounding in NLP that will serve as a foundation for further learning.
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Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing
Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years. This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools.
It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations. The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications.
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Natural Language Processing with Transformers: Building Language Applications with Hugging Face
Since their introduction in 2017, transformers have quickly become the dominant architecture for achieving state-of-the-art results on a variety of natural language processing tasks. If you’re a data scientist or coder, this practical book shows you how to train and scale these large models using Hugging Face Transformers, a Python-based deep learning library.
Transformers have been used to write realistic news stories, improve Google Search queries, and even create chatbots that tell corny jokes. In this guide, authors Lewis Tunstall, Leandro von Werra, and Thomas Wolf, among the creators of Hugging Face Transformers, use a hands-on approach to teach you how transformers work and how to integrate them in your applications. You’ll quickly learn a variety of tasks they can help you solve.
- Build, debug, and optimize transformer models for core NLP tasks, such as text classification, named entity recognition, and question answering
- Learn how transformers can be used for cross-lingual transfer learning
- Apply transformers in real-world scenarios where labeled data is scarce
- Make transformer models efficient for deployment using techniques such as distillation, pruning, and quantization
- Train transformers from scratch and learn how to scale to multiple GPUs and distributed environments
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Conclusion:
Up to now, we have discussed the Best Natural Language Processing Books for Beginners, and also some Best Natural Language Processing Books for Beginners to Advanced Learners.