Language is an integral part of our daily life and a natural way of conveying ideas from person to person. But as easy it is for us to understand our native language, it is just as difficult for computers to process it. The internet changed the science of language forever because it allowed collecting huge volumes of text and audio records. The field of knowledge that arose at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, and machine learning was called natural language processing (NLP).
In this chapter, we will get acquainted with the basic concepts and applications of NLP, relevant in the context of mobile development. We will talk about the powerful tools provided by iOS and the macOS SDK for language processing. We also will learn about the theory of distributional semantics and vector representations of words as its embodiment. They will allow...