Natural Language Processing with Python

Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to the following people for feedback on earlier drafts of this book: Doug Arnold, Michaela Atterer, Greg Aumann, Kenneth Beesley, Steven Bethard, Ondrej Bojar, Chris Cieri, Robin Cooper, Grev Corbett, James Curran, Dan Garrette, Jean Mark Gawron, Doug Hellmann, Nitin Indurkhya, Mark Liberman, Peter Ljunglöf, Stefan Müller, Robin Munn, Joel Nothman, Adam Przepiorkowski, Brandon Rhodes, Stuart Robinson, Jussi Salmela, Kyle Schlansker, Rob Speer, and Richard Sproat. We are thankful to many students and colleagues for their comments on the class materials that evolved into these chapters, including participants at NLP and linguistics summer schools in Brazil, India, and the USA. This book would not exist without the members of the nltk-dev developer community, named on the NLTK website, who have given so freely of their time and expertise in building and extending NLTK.

We are grateful to the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Linguistic Data Consortium, an Edward Clarence Dyason Fellowship, and the Universities of Pennsylvania, Edinburgh, and Melbourne for supporting our work on this book.

We thank Julie Steele, Abby Fox, Loranah Dimant, and the rest of the O’Reilly team, for organizing comprehensive reviews of our drafts from people across the NLP and Python communities, for cheerfully customizing O’Reilly’s production tools to accommodate our needs, and for meticulous copyediting work.

Finally, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to our partners, Kay, Mimo, and Jee, for their love, patience, and support over the many years that we worked on this book. We hope that our children—Andrew, Alison, Kirsten, Leonie, and Maaike—catch our enthusiasm for language and computation from these pages.