Book Review: Natural Language Processing with Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper
This book comes with "batteries included" (a reference to the phrase often used to explain the popularity of the Python programming language) It is the companion book to an impressive open source software library called the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) written in Python. NLTK combines language processing tools (tokenizers, stemmers, taggers, syntactic parsers, semantic analyzers) and standard data sets (corpora and tools to access the corpora in an efficient and uniform manner) Although the book builds on the NLTK library, it covers only a relatively small part of what can be done with it. The combination of the book with NLTK, a growing system of carefully designed, maintained, and documented code libraries, is an extraordinary resource that will dramatically influence the way computational linguistics is taught. The book attempts to cater to a large audience: It is a textbook on computational linguistics for science and engineering students; it also serves as practical documentation for the NLTK library, and it finally attempts to provide an introduction to programming and algorithm design for humanities students. I have used the book and its earlier on line versions to teach advanced undergraduate and graduate students in computer science in the past eight years. The book adopts the following approach:
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