Biostatistics Software-Technology

Introduction to Natural Language Processing: Concepts and Fundamentals for Beginners

by Michael Walker
Copyright (c) 2018.

This book sits in a series by the publishing house AI Sciences that traverses topics in the field of Artificial Intelligence to make these subjects more accessible for the masses. I bought this book’s Kindle Edition for only $5. Interestingly, this was one of the most expensive items in the series.

I am glad to have taken this short (77-page) book for a perusal. It reviewed some of my prior knowledge about Natural Language Processing (NLP) as well as extended my knowledge in new directions.

NLP studies how computers learn human languages. This process mimics how humans learn language in the brain. I’ve used some of its contents as I’ve taught computers how to master the art of classifying information in our scholar database. So I can indeed testify that these concepts are not mere pie-in-the-sky concepts but actually help real software function.

Concepts like Auto-Summarization of texts, Stemming (analyzing words based on their word-stems to acquire meaning), Bag of Words (analyzing texts by word frequency), and Deep Learning algorithms are discussed. As a computer programmer, I find this type of work very interesting to learn and follow.