Learning NLP Basics

While working on this book, we were focusing on including recipes that should be useful for a wide variety of NLP projects. They range from simple to advanced, from dealing with grammar to dealing with visualizations, and in many of them, options for languages other than English are included. In this new edition, we have included new topics that cover using GPT and other large language models, explainable AI, a new chapter on transformers, and natural language understanding. We hope you find the book useful.

The format of the book is that of a programming cookbook, where each recipe is a short mini-project with a concrete goal and a sequence of steps that need to be performed. There are few theoretical explanations and a focus on the practical goals and what needs to be done to achieve them.

Before we can get on with the real work of NLP, we need to prepare our text for processing. This chapter will show you how to do it. By the end of the chapter, you will...