Getting started with NLP using NLTK and SciPy

There are many different NLP libraries available in the Python language that allow users to accomplish a variety of different tasks for analyzing data, generating insights, or preparing predictive models. To begin our journey in the realm of NLP, we will take advantage of two popular libraries known as NLTK and SciPy. We will begin by importing these two libraries:

import nltk
import scipy

Often, we will want to parse and analyze raw pieces of text for particular purposes. Take, for example, the following paragraph regarding the field of biotechnology:

paragraph = """Biotechnology is a broad area of biology, involving the use of living systems and organisms to develop or make products. Depending on the tools and applications, it often overlaps with related scientific fields. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, biotechnology has expanded to include new and diverse sciences, such as genomics, recombinant gene...