Preface

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been used to address a wide range of problems, including support for search engines, summarizing and classifying text for web pages, and incorporating machine learning technologies to solve problems such as speech recognition and query analysis. It has found use wherever documents contain useful information.

NLP is used to enhance the utility and power of applications. It does so by making user input easier and converting text to more usable forms. In essence, NLP processes natural text found in a variety of sources, using a series of core NLP tasks to transform or extract information from the text.

This book focuses on core NLP tasks that will likely be encountered in an NLP application. Each NLP task presented in this book starts with a description of the problem and where it can be used. The issues that make each task difficult are introduced so that you can understand the problem in a better way. This is followed by the use of numerous Java techniques and APIs to support an NLP task.