Practical Natural Language Processing: A Pragmatic Approach to Processing and Analyzing Language Data

Many books and courses tackle natural language processing (NLP) problems with toy use cases and well-defined datasets. But if you want to build, iterate, and scale NLP systems in a business setting and tailor them for particular industry verticals, this is your guide. Software engineers and data scientists will learn how to navigate the maze of options available at each step of the journey.

Through the course of the book, authors Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, and Harshit Surana will guide you through the process of building real-world NLP solutions embedded in larger product setups. Youâ ll learn how to adapt your solutions for different industry verticals such as healthcare, social media, and retail.

With this book, youâ ll:

• Understand the wide spectrum of problem statements, tasks, and solution approaches within NLP
• Implement and evaluate different NLP applications using machine learning and deep learning methods
• Fine-tune your NLP solution based on your business problem and industry vertical
• Evaluate various algorithms and approaches for NLP product tasks, datasets, and stages
• Produce software solutions following best practices around release, deployment, and DevOps for NLP systems
• Understand best practices, opportunities, and the roadmap for NLP from a business and product leaderâ s perspective

Sowmya Vajjala has been a NLP practitioner and researcher since 2006. She is a PhD in Computational Linguistics from University of Tubingen. She has worked at Microsoft Research and was an Assistant Professor at Iowa State University in the past. She is currently a researcher at National Research Council, Canada.

Bodhisattwa Majumder is a PhD student in NLP and ML at UC San Diego. Earlier he studied at IIT Kharagpur where he graduated with Distinction (summa cum laude). He has previously built large scale NLP systems at Walmart Labs and will be joining Google AI Research in the summer of 2019 to work on multilingual NLP for Google Assistant.

Anuj Gupta has built NLP and ML systems and teams at Fortune 100 companies as well as early stage startups. He is an invited speaker and panelist at various industry conference on Machine Learning. He is a graduate of IIT Delhi and IIIT Hyderabad. He is currently a Staff Scientist at Intuit.

Harshit Surana has built and scaled NLP systems at several Silicon Valley startups as a founder and an advisor. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University where he worked with the MIT Media Lab on common sense AI. His publications in NLP have received over 200 citations. He is currently a co-founder at DeepFlux.