Fundamentals of NLP: Introducing Natural Language Processing

Skillsoft issued completion badges are earned based on viewing the percentage required or receiving a passing score when assessment is required. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on programmatically working with text or speech - the term ‘natural’ here emphasizes that the program must work with and be aware of everyday language, grammar and semantics, rather than structured text data such as might be found in database or string processing. In this course, you will learn about the two main branches of NLP, natural language understanding and natural language generation. You will also explore the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and spaCy, two popular Python libraries for natural language processing and analysis. Next, you will delve into common preprocessing steps for natural language data. This includes cleaning and tokenizing data, removing stopwords from your text, performing stemming and lemmatization, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and named entity recognition (NER). Finally, you will get set up with your Python environment and libraries for NLP and explore some text corpora that NLTK offers for working with text.