For the past couple of years I have been working on an introductory book on Natural Language Processing. While there are several excellent books on NLP already, I felt that they often assumed prior knowledge of NLP or linguistics and were not suitable for beginners, so I decided to write a book that can teach readers about the fundamental NLP concepts and algorithms not assuming any such prior knowledge. In addition, it is my firm belief that the best way to learn something is to do it in practice, so the book that I’ve written is very practice-oriented: each chapter introduces a new task and teaches you how to solve it using NLP techniques. In fact, you will only need to have basic Python skills to get started!

The book is finally out. It is called “Getting Started with Natural Language Processing” and it is published with Manning. It contains lots of accessible explanations and hands-on examples through which you will learn how to apply NLP to sentiment analysis, user profiling, topic modelling, information search, named entity recognition, and other tasks. As you go, each new project builds on what you’ve previously learned, introducing new concepts and skills.

The book is available via Manning and Amazon.

Book’s GitHub repo.