Practical Natural Language Processing
Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, Harshit Surana
Endorsed by Zachary Lipton, Sebastian Ruder & Marc Najork
Foreword by Julian McAuley
Read the testimonials
Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, Harshit Surana
Endorsed by Zachary Lipton, Sebastian Ruder & Marc Najork
Foreword by Julian McAuley
Read the testimonials
This book is your guide to build, iterate and scale NLP systems and to tailor them for various industry verticals
Consider the task of building a chatbot or text classification system at your organization. In the beginning there may be little or no data to work with. At this point a basic solution using rule based systems or traditional machine learning will be apt. As you accumulate more data, more sophisticated ML techniques (which are often data intensive) can be used including deep learning. At each step of this journey there are dozens of alternative approaches one can take. This book will help you navigate this maze of options.
You will also learn to adapt your solutions for different industry verticals like healthcare, social media and retail. Moreover, you will learn about specific caveats you will encounter in each. You will learn how to analyze health records, detect fake news, extract attributes from e-commerce products and much more.
Scientist at Amazon AI
Author of Dive into Deep Learning
Practical NLP focuses squarely on an overlooked demographic: the practitioners and business leaders in industry!
Scientist, Google DeepMind
Author of newsletter NLP News
This book does a great job bridging the gap between natural language processing research and practical applications.
Director, Google AI
ACM & IEEE Fellow
This book offers the best of both worlds: textbooks and 'cookbooks'. If you would like to go from zero to one in NLP, this book is for you!
Principal Researcher, Microsoft
Faculty at IIT Kharagpur
This book is a must for all aspiring NLP engineers, entrepreneurs who want to build companies around language technologies.
CTO-in-Residence
Microsoft For Startups
There is much hard-fought practical advice from the trenches. A must-read for engineers building NLP applications.
Data Scientist at Airbnb
Microsoft Research Fellow
I feel this is not only an essential book for NLP practitioners, it is also a valuable reference for the research community.
ML Engineer
The authors achieved a rare feat by simplifying the esoteric art of design and architecture of production quality ML systems.
CEO and co-founder at
SharpestMinds (YC W18)
This book gives a consolidated look at modern practice, starting from an MVP and building up to examples for sophisticated use cases.
Professor at UC San Diego
I am excited by the end-to-end approach taken in this book, which make it useful for a range of scenarios and help readers to work with the labyrinth of possible options while building NLP applications. I was thrilled to hear about efforts by Bodhisattwa, Sowmya, Anuj and Harshit to write a book on NLP. They have a wide experience in scaling NLP including at early-stage startups, the MIT Media Lab, Microsoft Research, and Google AI. This book is ideal both as a first resource to discover the field of natural language processing and a guide for seasoned practitioners looking to discover the latest developments in this exciting area.
Please note that readers pursuing cutting-edge research in NLP may find some sections of the book rudimentary as we do not cover in-depth theoretical and technical details related to NLP concepts. Moreover, we expect the readers to follow the respective documentations for various frameworks we use in our code examples.
Practical NLP is used as a reference book or a textbook at above-noted universities.
Looking for instructor resources ? Please visit this page.
Through the course of the book, we will guide you through the process of building real-world NLP solutions embedded in larger product setups via a compendium of over 450 references. With this book, you’ll:
Slides & talks for events will be updated soon
We are aware that some of the color figures are not legible in black and white in the paperback versions. So we have worked with O'Reilly Media to release higher-quality color versions of all images. They can be viewed for each chapter in our repository as well as download from practical-nlp-figures.
The errata of the book is accessible here. We thank our diligent readers who pointed out these points which we overlooked in our first edition. You can also submit any requests for techical or grammatical changes here.
The accompanying code for our book is publicly available in the repository. This repository is constantly evolving and under-review as we are updating the code with additional information going beyond what book covers.
