Chapter 1: Getting Started with spaCy
In this chapter, we will have a comprehensive introduction to natural language processing (NLP) application development with Python and spaCy. First, we will see how NLP development goes hand in hand with Python, along with an overview of what spaCy offers as a Python library.
After the warm-up, you will quickly get started with spaCy by downloading the library and loading the models. You will then explore spaCy's popular visualizer displaCy by visualizing several features of spaCy.
By the end of this chapter, you will know what you can achieve with spaCy and how to plan your journey with spaCy code. You will be also settled with your development environment, having already installed all the necessary packages for NLP tasks in the upcoming sections.
We're going to cover the following main topics in this chapter:
- Overview of spaCy
- Installing spaCy
- Installing spaCy's statistical models
- Visualization with displaCy