Free Book on Python Programming and Natural Language

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June 26, 2007

NLTK, the Natural Language Toolkit, is a suite of open source Python modules, data sets and tutorials supporting research and development in natural language processing. Natural language processing systems convert information from computer databases into normal-sounding human language, and natural language understanding systems convert samples of human language into more formal representations that are easier for computer programs to manipulate. In theory natural language processing is a very attractive method of human-computer interaction.

NLTK currently contains 50,000 lines of code, 300Mb of datasets, and a free 360 page book that teaches both Python and Natural Language Processing (written by by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper). Presentation slides are also available for some of the book chapters. NLTK has been adopted in at least 40 University Courses. It is hosted on sourceforge, and is ranked among the top 200 projects. he fact that Python lets them do this is a testament to its usefulness. The NLTK Python book has been revised in Part I (tokenization, tagging, chunking) and Part II (grammars and parsing).

NLTK Content:

- Book - a 380-page online book Natural Language Processing in Python
- Code - corpus readers, tokenizers, stemmers, taggers, chunkers, parsers, wordnet, ... (50k lines of code)
- Corpora - 20+ annotated data sets widely used in natural language processing (300Mb data)
- Documentation - the book, articles, reviews, API documentation
- Mailing List - receive important announcements about NLTK by email

Natural Language Processing in Python Book

Frontmatter
HTML PDF Preface
HTML PDF 1. Introduction

Part I — Basics
HTML PDF 2. Programming
HTML PDF 3. Words
HTML PDF 4. Tagging
HTML PDF 5. Chunking

Part II — Parsing
HTML PDF 6. Structured Programming
HTML PDF 7. Grammars and Parsing
HTML PDF 8. Advanced Parsing
HTML PDF 9. Feature Based Grammar

Part III — Advanced Topics (Draft only, 50% complete)
HTML PDF 10. Advanced Programming (25% complete)
HTML PDF 11. Semantic Interpretation (90% complete)
HTML PDF 12. Language Engineering (25% complete)
HTML PDF 13. Managing Linguistic Data (50% complete)

Appendixes
HTML PDF 14. Regular Expressions
HTML PDF 15. NLP using Python vs Other Languages
HTML PDF 16. NLTK Modules and Corpora
HTML PDF 17. Cheat Sheet
HTML PDF Term Index
HTML PDF Download entire book

NLTK and Natural Language Processing Documentation

Getting Started on Natural Language Processing with Python
Nitin Madnani. ACM Crossroads, Volume 13, Issue 4, 2007.

Computational Semantics in the Natural Language Toolkit
Ewan Klein. Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop Sydney, Australia. November/December 2006.

NLTK-Lite: Efficient Scripting for Natural Language Processing
Steven Bird. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON). pp 11-18, Kanpur, India. New Delhi: Allied Publishers. December 2005.

NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit
Steven Bird and Edward Loper. Proceedings of the ACL demonstration session. pp 214-217, Barcelona, Association for Computational Linguistics, July 2004.

NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit
Edward Loper and Steven Bird, Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics, pp 62-69, Philadelphia, Association for Computational Linguistics. July 2002.

Processing Corpora with Python and the Natural Language Toolkit
Stuart Robinson, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen

Charming Python: Get started with the Natural Language Toolkit
David Mertz, Gnosis Software Inc

Review of NLTK 1.2 (Linguist List)
Kevin Russell, University of Manitoba