The phrase ‘the meaning of life’ for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited, stimulating, and quirky enquiry, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer.
This book will show you the essential techniques of text and language processing. Starting with tokenization, stemming, and the WordNet dictionary, you’ll progress to part-of-speech tagging, phrase chunking, and named entity recognition. You’ll learn how various text corpora are organized, as well as how to create your own custom corpus. Then, you’ll move onto text classification with a focus on sentiment analysis. And because NLP can be computationally expensive on large bodies of text, you’ll try a few methods for distributed text processing. Finally, you’ll be introduced to a number of other small but complementary Python libraries for text analysis, cleaning, and parsing.
