August 28, 2009 at 06:46 Tags Book reviews

Natural language processing (NLP) researchers and students who want a learn a solid programming tool to help them with their work. Python programmers who want to find out more about NLP. Newbies in both Python and NLP who just think the topic sounds cool and those whales on the cover are kinda cute.

There are three kinds of people who might think this book could be useful:In my opinion, the only kind that will find this book suitable and useful is (1). If you're familiar with Python and know no NLP it won't help you much, because it doesn't really teach NLP. It shows a few domains of this vast field, with nice code examples and all, but you should probably start with some introductory textbook on the subject or a course. You won't really learn NLP here. The book's focus is mostly on the NLTK library written in Python by the authors. This library implements many NLP algorithms and comes with lots of data for testing and training. Almost no algorithms are implemented in the book - some are explained, and the code always imports the required modules from NLTK and shows their usage. The Python code is well-written and clean. To conclude, if you're a NLP researcher or student, this is a very good book to read. Especially if you plan to start working with NLTK (which seems like a mature and powerful tool) - this book will serve as a great introduction. If you have other interests, this is probably not the right book.