Natural Language Processing with Python

Further Reading

This chapter has introduced new concepts in programming, natural language processing, and linguistics, all mixed in together. Many of them are consolidated in the following chapters. However, you may also want to consult the online materials provided with this chapter (at http://www.nltk.org/), including links to additional background materials, and links to online NLP systems. You may also like to read up on some linguistics and NLP-related concepts in Wikipedia (e.g., collocations, the Turing Test, the type-token distinction).

You should acquaint yourself with the Python documentation available at http://docs.python.org/, including the many tutorials and comprehensive reference materials linked there. A Beginner’s Guide to Python is available at http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide. Miscellaneous questions about Python might be answered in the FAQ at http://www.python.org/doc/faq/general/.

As you delve into NLTK, you might want to subscribe to the mailing list where new releases of the toolkit are announced. There is also an NLTK-Users mailing list, where users help each other as they learn how to use Python and NLTK for language analysis work. Details of these lists are available at http://www.nltk.org/.

For more information on the topics covered in Automatic Natural Language Understanding, and on NLP more generally, you might like to consult one of the following excellent books:

• Indurkhya, Nitin and Fred Damerau (eds., 2010) Handbook of Natural Language Processing (second edition), Chapman & Hall/CRC.

• Jurafsky, Daniel and James Martin (2008) Speech and Language Processing (second edition), Prentice Hall.

• Mitkov, Ruslan (ed., 2002) The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Oxford University Press. (second edition expected in 2010).

The Association for Computational Linguistics is the international organization that represents the field of NLP. The ACL website hosts many useful resources, including: information about international and regional conferences and workshops; the ACL Wiki with links to hundreds of useful resources; and the ACL Anthology, which contains most of the NLP research literature from the past 50 years, fully indexed and freely downloadable.

Some excellent introductory linguistics textbooks are: (Finegan, 2007), (O’Grady et al., 2004), (OSU, 2007). You might like to consult LanguageLog, a popular linguistics blog with occasional posts that use the techniques described in this book.