Natural Language Processing Basics with NLTK Workshop

A vast amount of the world’s data (and your own) is text and the key to unlocking its value is in a series of standard natural language processing steps that we must make on raw text to ensure that it is understandable to machines. This workshop will teach you how to transform strings to machine usable data and discuss how to apply each step to your application. We’ll be using Python’s NLTK - a professional grade Natural Language Toolkit that is free and open source.

The price per attendee is $150.

What To Bring:

• Your laptop

• Printed copy of your ticket

Prior to the Event:

Please take our survey so that we can get a feel for the make up of the class. Although, I'd ask only folks who are registered to take the survey-- this will allow us to customize the class to the group.

NLP Workshop Questionnaire (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1nF5wYXZyvRee7Q2lRwQK35M_50rW_tgxzpaBBQ5-YCI/viewform)

Abstract:

Many of the largest and most difficult to process data sets that we encounter tend not to be from well structured logs or databases, but rather unstructured bodies of text. In recent years, Natural Language Processing techniques have accelerated our ability to stochastically mine data from unstructured text but require large training data sets themselves to produce meaningful results.

The most popular open source tool for NLP is NLTK and it embraces these techniques, while providing a powerful interface in Python for us to quickly add NLP to our applications.

Outline:

Organizing large bodies of text (corpora)

Task: tokenization and segmentation;Motivation: cross-document language statistics

Task: tagging and stemming; Motivation: information extraction

Task: parsing for treebanks; Motivation: discovering crucial concepts

We will provide a virtual machine (vmware) containing an NLP development environment with all required software preinstalled and preconfigured for this workshop.

If you have text that you would like to process, please bring your data along. If not, we will be using corpora from Project Gutenberg.

Instructor

Benjamin Bengfort, Data Science Consultant, Full Stack Data Science

Benjamin Bengfort (http://linkedin.com/in/bbengfort) is a Data Science consultant at Full Stack Data Science, and has used Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing techniques to determine textual complexity in large literary corpora. He is a PhD candidate in Computer Science, with a focus on NLP, at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and has a MS in Computer Science from North Dakota State University.