Selecting Libraries and Tools for Natural Language Understanding
This chapter will get you set up to process natural language. We will begin by discussing how to install Python, and then we will discuss general software development tools such as JupyterLab and GitHub. We will also review major Python natural language processing (NLP) libraries, including the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), spaCy, and TensorFlow/Keras.
Natural language understanding (NLU) technology has benefited from a wide assortment of very capable, freely available tools. While these tools are very powerful, there is no one library that can do all of the NLP tasks needed for all applications, so it is important to understand what the strengths of the different libraries are and how to combine them.
Making the best use of these tools will greatly accelerate any NLU development project. These tools include the Python language itself, development tools such as JupyterLab, and a number of specific natural language...