Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper: Natural Language Processing with Python, Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit O’Reilly Media, Beijing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-596-51649-9

• Published in: Language Resources and Evaluation Vol. 44; no. 4; pp. 421 - 424
• Main Author: Wagner, Wiebke
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.12.2010; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Birds; Computational Linguistics; Computer Science; Language; Language and Literature; Linguistics; Logic; Natural language processing; Programming languages; Semantics; Social Sciences; Software; Theory; Beijing China; China
• DOI: 10.1007/s10579-010-9124-x
• ISSN: 1574-020X

Lang Resources & Evaluation (2010) 44:421424 DOI 10.1007/s10579-010-9124-x Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper: Natural Language Processing with Python, Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit OReilly Media, Beijing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-596-51649-9 Wiebke Wagner Published online: 27 May 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Natural Language Processing (NLP) is experiencing rapid growth as its theories and methods are more and more deployed in a wide range of different elds. The book Natural Language Processing with Python by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper is a recent contribution to cover this demand. Throughout the book, the authors have to nd the right balance between what the reader has to know and what would be too much detail; how much programming 123 Book review 423 knowledge is essential and how much theoretical background is needed to apply a certain NLP method a subtle problem the authors manage to balance very well. [...]they show on several pages why pp-attachment resolution is such a crucial task (Chap. 8, p. 298ff) or why databases are not sufcient for the representation of meaning (Chap. 10, p. 361ff). Since the focus of the book lies mainly on practical solutions for language processing, the authors cannot provide very deep insights into theoretical issues.