Introduction to Natural Language Processing in Python

Overview

Learn fundamental natural language processing techniques using Python and how to apply them to extract insights from real-world text data.

In this course, you'll learn natural language processing (NLP) basics, such as how to identify and separate words, how to extract topics in a text, and how to build your own fake news classifier. You'll also learn how to use basic libraries such as NLTK, alongside libraries which utilize deep learning to solve common NLP problems. This course will give you the foundation to process and parse text as you move forward in your Python learning.

Syllabus

Regular expressions & word tokenization

This chapter will introduce some basic NLP concepts, such as word tokenization and regular expressions to help parse text. You'll also learn how to handle non-English text and more difficult tokenization you might find.

Simple topic identification

This chapter will introduce you to topic identification, which you can apply to any text you encounter in the wild. Using basic NLP models, you will identify topics from texts based on term frequencies. You'll experiment and compare two simple methods: bag-of-words and Tf-idf using NLTK, and a new library Gensim.

Named-entity recognition

This chapter will introduce a slightly more advanced topic: named-entity recognition. You'll learn how to identify the who, what, and where of your texts using pre-trained models on English and non-English text. You'll also learn how to use some new libraries, polyglot and spaCy, to add to your NLP toolbox.

Building a "fake news" classifier

You'll apply the basics of what you've learned along with some supervised machine learning to build a "fake news" detector. You'll begin by learning the basics of supervised machine learning, and then move forward by choosing a few important features and testing ideas to identify and classify fake news articles.