Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts


Book Description

More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital form. Digitization of paper documents is motivated by the aim of preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible, both to laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text, digitization projects increasingly strive to create digital text, which can be searched and otherwise automatically processed, in addition to facsimiles. Indeed, the emerging field of digital humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its studies. Together with the increasing availability of historical texts in digital form, there is a growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts. However, the specific linguistic properties of historical texts -- the lack of standardized orthography, in particular -- pose special challenges for NLP. This book aims to give an introduction to NLP for historical texts and an overview of the state of the art in this field. The book starts with an overview of methods for the acquisition of historical texts (scanning and OCR), discusses text encoding and annotation schemes, and presents examples of corpora of historical texts in a variety of languages. The book then discusses specific methods, such as creating part-of-speech taggers for historical languages or handling spelling variation. A final chapter analyzes the relationship between NLP and the digital humanities. Certain recently emerging textual genres, such as SMS, social media, and chat messages, or newsgroup and forum postings share a number of properties with historical texts, for example, nonstandard orthography and grammar, and profuse use of abbreviations. The methods and techniques required for the effective processing of historical texts are thus also of interest for research in other domains. Table of Contents: Introduction / NLP and Digital Humanities / Spelling in Historical Texts / Acquiring Historical Texts / Text Encoding and Annotation Schemes / Handling Spelling Variation / NLP Tools for Historical Languages / Historical Corpora / Conclusion / Bibliography




Current Issues in Computational Linguistics: In Honour of Don Walker


Book Description

With this volume in honour of Don Walker, Linguistica Computazionale con tinues the series of special issues dedicated to outstanding personalities who have made a significant contribution to the progress of our discipline and maintained a special collaborative relationship with our Institute in Pisa. I take the liberty of quoting in this preface some of the initiatives Pisa and Don Walker have jointly promoted and developed during our collaboration, because I think that they might serve to illustrate some outstanding features of Don's personality, in particular his capacity for identifying areas of potential convergence among the different scientific communities within our field and establishing concrete forms of coop eration. These initiatives also testify to his continuous and untiring work, dedi cated to putting people into contact and opening up communication between them, collecting and disseminating information, knowledge and resources, and creating shareable basic infrastructures needed for progress in our field. Our collaboration began within the Linguistics in Documentation group of the FID and continued in the framework of the !CCL (International Committee for Computational Linguistics). In 1982 this collaboration was strengthened when, at CO LING in Prague, I was invited by Don to join him in the organization of a series of workshops with participants of the various communities interested in the study, development, and use of computational lexica.




Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts


Book Description

More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital form. Digitization of paper documents is motivated by the aim of preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible, both to laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text, digitization projects increasingly strive to create digital text, which can be searched and otherwise automatically processed, in addition to facsimiles. Indeed, the emerging field of digital humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its studies. Together with the increasing availability of historical texts in digital form, there is a growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts. However, the specific linguistic properties of historical texts -- the lack of standardized orthography, in particular -- pose special challenges for NLP. This book aims to give an introduction to NLP for historical texts and an overview of the state of the art in this field. The book starts with an overview of methods for the acquisition of historical texts (scanning and OCR), discusses text encoding and annotation schemes, and presents examples of corpora of historical texts in a variety of languages. The book then discusses specific methods, such as creating part-of-speech taggers for historical languages or handling spelling variation. A final chapter analyzes the relationship between NLP and the digital humanities. Certain recently emerging textual genres, such as SMS, social media, and chat messages, or newsgroup and forum postings share a number of properties with historical texts, for example, nonstandard orthography and grammar, and profuse use of abbreviations. The methods and techniques required for the effective processing of historical texts are thus also of interest for research in other domains. Table of Contents: Introduction / NLP and Digital Humanities / Spelling in Historical Texts / Acquiring Historical Texts / Text Encoding and Annotation Schemes / Handling Spelling Variation / NLP Tools for Historical Languages / Historical Corpora / Conclusion / Bibliography




Speech & Language Processing


Book Description




Biomedical Natural Language Processing


Book Description

Biomedical Natural Language Processing is a comprehensive tour through the classic and current work in the field. It discusses all subjects from both a rule-based and a machine learning approach, and also describes each subject from the perspective of both biological science and clinical medicine. The intended audience is readers who already have a background in natural language processing, but a clear introduction makes it accessible to readers from the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology, as well. The book is suitable as a reference, as well as a text for advanced courses in biomedical natural language processing and text mining.




Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing


Book Description

Explore the most challenging issues of natural language processing, and learn how to solve them with cutting-edge deep learning! Inside Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing you’ll find a wealth of NLP insights, including: An overview of NLP and deep learning One-hot text representations Word embeddings Models for textual similarity Sequential NLP Semantic role labeling Deep memory-based NLP Linguistic structure Hyperparameters for deep NLP Deep learning has advanced natural language processing to exciting new levels and powerful new applications! For the first time, computer systems can achieve "human" levels of summarizing, making connections, and other tasks that require comprehension and context. Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing reveals the groundbreaking techniques that make these innovations possible. Stephan Raaijmakers distills his extensive knowledge into useful best practices, real-world applications, and the inner workings of top NLP algorithms. About the technology Deep learning has transformed the field of natural language processing. Neural networks recognize not just words and phrases, but also patterns. Models infer meaning from context, and determine emotional tone. Powerful deep learning-based NLP models open up a goldmine of potential uses. About the book Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing teaches you how to create advanced NLP applications using Python and the Keras deep learning library. You’ll learn to use state-of the-art tools and techniques including BERT and XLNET, multitask learning, and deep memory-based NLP. Fascinating examples give you hands-on experience with a variety of real world NLP applications. Plus, the detailed code discussions show you exactly how to adapt each example to your own uses! What's inside Improve question answering with sequential NLP Boost performance with linguistic multitask learning Accurately interpret linguistic structure Master multiple word embedding techniques About the reader For readers with intermediate Python skills and a general knowledge of NLP. No experience with deep learning is required. About the author Stephan Raaijmakers is professor of Communicative AI at Leiden University and a senior scientist at The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO). Table of Contents PART 1 INTRODUCTION 1 Deep learning for NLP 2 Deep learning and language: The basics 3 Text embeddings PART 2 DEEP NLP 4 Textual similarity 5 Sequential NLP 6 Episodic memory for NLP PART 3 ADVANCED TOPICS 7 Attention 8 Multitask learning 9 Transformers 10 Applications of Transformers: Hands-on with BERT




Natural Language Processing in Action


Book Description

Summary Natural Language Processing in Action is your guide to creating machines that understand human language using the power of Python with its ecosystem of packages dedicated to NLP and AI. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology Recent advances in deep learning empower applications to understand text and speech with extreme accuracy. The result? Chatbots that can imitate real people, meaningful resume-to-job matches, superb predictive search, and automatically generated document summaries—all at a low cost. New techniques, along with accessible tools like Keras and TensorFlow, make professional-quality NLP easier than ever before. About the Book Natural Language Processing in Action is your guide to building machines that can read and interpret human language. In it, you'll use readily available Python packages to capture the meaning in text and react accordingly. The book expands traditional NLP approaches to include neural networks, modern deep learning algorithms, and generative techniques as you tackle real-world problems like extracting dates and names, composing text, and answering free-form questions. What's inside Some sentences in this book were written by NLP! Can you guess which ones? Working with Keras, TensorFlow, gensim, and scikit-learn Rule-based and data-based NLP Scalable pipelines About the Reader This book requires a basic understanding of deep learning and intermediate Python skills. About the Author Hobson Lane, Cole Howard, and Hannes Max Hapke are experienced NLP engineers who use these techniques in production. Table of Contents PART 1 - WORDY MACHINES Packets of thought (NLP overview) Build your vocabulary (word tokenization) Math with words (TF-IDF vectors) Finding meaning in word counts (semantic analysis) PART 2 - DEEPER LEARNING (NEURAL NETWORKS) Baby steps with neural networks (perceptrons and backpropagation) Reasoning with word vectors (Word2vec) Getting words in order with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) Loopy (recurrent) neural networks (RNNs) Improving retention with long short-term memory networks Sequence-to-sequence models and attention PART 3 - GETTING REAL (REAL-WORLD NLP CHALLENGES) Information extraction (named entity extraction and question answering) Getting chatty (dialog engines) Scaling up (optimization, parallelization, and batch processing)




Natural Language Processing for Online Applications


Book Description

This text covers the technologies of document retrieval, information extraction, and text categorization in a way which highlights commonalities in terms of both general principles and practical concerns. It assumes some mathematical background on the part of the reader, but the chapters typically begin with a non-mathematical account of the key issues. Current research topics are covered only to the extent that they are informing current applications; detailed coverage of longer term research and more theoretical treatments should be sought elsewhere. There are many pointers at the ends of the chapters that the reader can follow to explore the literature. However, the book does maintain a strong emphasis on evaluation in every chapter both in terms of methodology and the results of controlled experimentation.




Applied Natural Language Processing in the Enterprise


Book Description

NLP has exploded in popularity over the last few years. But while Google, Facebook, OpenAI, and others continue to release larger language models, many teams still struggle with building NLP applications that live up to the hype. This hands-on guide helps you get up to speed on the latest and most promising trends in NLP. With a basic understanding of machine learning and some Python experience, you'll learn how to build, train, and deploy models for real-world applications in your organization. Authors Ankur Patel and Ajay Uppili Arasanipalai guide you through the process using code and examples that highlight the best practices in modern NLP. Use state-of-the-art NLP models such as BERT and GPT-3 to solve NLP tasks such as named entity recognition, text classification, semantic search, and reading comprehension Train NLP models with performance comparable or superior to that of out-of-the-box systems Learn about Transformer architecture and modern tricks like transfer learning that have taken the NLP world by storm Become familiar with the tools of the trade, including spaCy, Hugging Face, and fast.ai Build core parts of the NLP pipeline--including tokenizers, embeddings, and language models--from scratch using Python and PyTorch Take your models out of Jupyter notebooks and learn how to deploy, monitor, and maintain them in production




Introduction to Natural Language Processing


Book Description

A survey of computational methods for understanding, generating, and manipulating human language, which offers a synthesis of classical representations and algorithms with contemporary machine learning techniques. This textbook provides a technical perspective on natural language processing—methods for building computer software that understands, generates, and manipulates human language. It emphasizes contemporary data-driven approaches, focusing on techniques from supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The first section establishes a foundation in machine learning by building a set of tools that will be used throughout the book and applying them to word-based textual analysis. The second section introduces structured representations of language, including sequences, trees, and graphs. The third section explores different approaches to the representation and analysis of linguistic meaning, ranging from formal logic to neural word embeddings. The final section offers chapter-length treatments of three transformative applications of natural language processing: information extraction, machine translation, and text generation. End-of-chapter exercises include both paper-and-pencil analysis and software implementation. The text synthesizes and distills a broad and diverse research literature, linking contemporary machine learning techniques with the field's linguistic and computational foundations. It is suitable for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses and as a reference for software engineers and data scientists. Readers should have a background in computer programming and college-level mathematics. After mastering the material presented, students will have the technical skill to build and analyze novel natural language processing systems and to understand the latest research in the field.