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Natural Language Processing: Step by Step Guide
Amruta 1
Last Updated : 26 Feb, 2024
Introduction
NLP stands for Natural Language Processing, a part of Computer Science,
Human Language, and Artificial Intelligence. This technology is used by
computers to understand, analyze, manipulate, and interpret human languages.
NLP algorithms, leveraged by data scientists and machine learning professionals,
are widely used everywhere in areas like Gmail spam, any search, games, and
many more. These algorithms employ techniques such as neural networks to
process and interpret text, enabling tasks like sentiment analysis, document
classification, and information retrieval. Not only that, today we have build
complex deep learning architectures like transformers which are used to build
language models that are the core behind GPT, Gemini, and the likes.
Learning Objective
Basic understanding of Natural Language Processing.
Learn Various Techniques used for the implementation of NLP.
Understand how to use NLP for text mining.
This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon
Table of contents
1. Why NLP is so important?
2. Components of NLP
Natural Language Understanding
Natural Language Generation
3. Phases of NLP
Lexical Analysis
Syntactic Analysis
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Why NLP is so important?
Text data in a massive amount
NLP helps machines to interact with humans in their language and perform
related tasks like reading text, understand speech and interpret it in well format.
Nowadays machines can analyze more data rather than humans efficiently. All of
us know that every day plenty amount of data is generated from various fields
such as the medical and pharma industry, social media like Facebook, Instagram,
etc. And this data is not well structured (i.e. unstructured) so it becomes a
tedious job, that’s why we need NLP. We need NLP for tasks like sentiment
analysis, machine translation, POS tagging or part-of-speech tagging , named
entity recognition, creating chatbots, comment segmentation, question
answering, etc.
Unstructured data to structured
We know that supervised and unsupervised learning and deep learning are now
extensively used to manipulate human language. That’s why we need a proper
understanding of the text. I am going to explain this understanding in this
article.NLP is very important to get exact or useful insights from text. Meaningful
information is gathered
Components of NLP
NLP is divided into two components.
Natural Language Understanding
Natural Language Generation
Natural Language Understanding
Natural Language Understanding (NLU) helps the machine to understand and
analyze human language by extracting the text from large data such as
keywords, emotions, relations, and semantics, etc.
Let’s see what challenges are faced by a machine-
For Example:-
He is looking for a match.
What do you understand by the ‘match’ keyword? Does it partner or cricket or
football or anything else?
This is Lexical Ambiguity. It happens when a word has different meanings.
Lexical ambiguity can be resolved by using parts-of-speech (POS)tagging
techniques.
The Fish is ready to eat.
What do you understand by the above example? Is the fish ready to eat his/her
food or fish is ready for someone to eat? Got confused!! Right? We will see it
practically below.
This is Syntactical Ambiguity which means when we see more meanings in a
sequence of words and also Called Grammatical Ambiguity.
Natural Language Generation
It is the process of extracting meaningful insights as phrases and sentences in
the form of natural language.
It consists −
Text planning − It includes retrieving the relevant data from the domain.
Sentence planning − It is nothing but a selection of important words,
meaningful phrases, or sentences.
Phases of NLP
Lexical Analysis
It involves identifying and analyzing the structure of words. Lexicon of a
language means the collection of words and phrases in that particular language.
The lexical analysis divides the text into paragraphs, sentences, and words. So
we need to perform Lexicon Normalization.
The most common lexicon normalization techniques are Stemming:
Stemming: Stemming is the process of reducing derived words to their word
stem, base, or root form—generally a written word form like-“ing”, “ly”, “es”,
“s”, etc
Lemmatization: Lemmatization is the process of reducing a group of words
into their lemma or dictionary form. It takes into account things like
POS(Parts of Speech), the meaning of the word in the sentence, the meaning
of the word in the nearby sentences, etc. before reducing the word to its
lemma.
Syntactic Analysis
Syntactic Analysis is used to check grammar, arrangements of words, and the
interrelationship between the words.
Example: Mumbai goes to the Sara
Here “Mumbai goes to Sara”, which does not make any sense, so this sentence is
rejected by the Syntactic analyzer.
Syntactical parsing involves the analysis of words in the sentence for grammar.
Dependency Grammar and Part of Speech (POS)tags are the important attributes
of text syntactic.
Semantic Analysis
Retrieves the possible meanings of a sentence that is clear and semantically
correct. Its process of retrieving meaningful insights from text.
Discourse Integration
It is nothing but a sense of context. That is sentence or word depends upon that
sentences or words. It’s like the use of proper nouns/pronouns.
For example, Ram wants it.
In the above statement, we can clearly see that the “it” keyword does not make
any sense. In fact, it is referring to anything that we don’t know. That is nothing
but this “it” word depends upon the previous sentence which is not given. So
once we get to know about “it”, we can easily find out the reference.
Pragmatic Analysis
It means the study of meanings in a given language. Process of extraction of
insights from the text. It includes the repetition of words, who said to whom? etc.
It understands that how people communicate with each other, in which context
they are talking and so many aspects.
Okay! .. So at this point, we came to know that all the basic concepts of NLP.
Here we will discuss all these points practically …so let’s move on!
Implementation of NLP using Python
I am going to show you how to perform NLP using Python. Python is very simple,
easy to understand and interpret.
First, we will import all necessary libraries as shown below. We will be working
with the NLTK library but there is also the spacy library for this.
Copy Code
# Importing the libraries
import pandas as pd
import re
from nltk.corpus import stopwords
from nltk.stem.porter import PorterStemmer
In the above code, we have imported libraries such as pandas to deal with data
frames/datasets, re for regular expression, nltk is a natural language tool kit in
which we have imported modules like stopwords which is nothing but
“dictionary” and PorterStemmer to generate root word.
Copy Code
df=pd.read_csv('Womens Clothing E-Commerce Reviews.csv',header=0,index_col=0)
df.head()
# Null Entries
df.isna().sum()
Here we have read the file named “Women’s Clothing E-Commerce Reviews” in
CSV(comma-separated value) format. And also checked for null values.
You can find this dataset on this link:
Copy Code
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
sns.countplot(x='Rating',data=df_temp)
plt.title("Distribution of Rating")
Further, we will perform some data visualizations using matplotlib and seaborn
libraries which are really the best visualization libraries in Python. I have taken
only one graph, you can perform more graphs to see how your data is!
Copy Code
nltk.download('stopwords')
stops=stopwords.words("english")
From nltk library, we have to download stopwords for text cleaning.
Copy Code
review=df_temp[['Review','Recommended']]
pd.DataFrame(review)
def tokens(words):
words = re.sub("[^a-zA-Z]"," ", words)
text = words.lower().split()
return " ".join(text)
review['Review_clear'] = review['Review'].apply(tokens)
review.head()
corpus=[]
for i in range(0,22628):
Review=re.sub("[^a-zA-Z]"," ", df_temp["Review"][i])
Review=Review.lower()
Review=Review.split()
ps=PorterStemmer()
Review=[ps.stem(word) for word in Review if not word in set(stops)]
tocken=" ".join(Review)
corpus.append(tocken)
Here we will perform all operations of data cleaning such as lemmatization,
stemming, etc to get pure data.
Copy Code
positive_words =[]
for i in positive.Review_clear:
positive_words.append(i)
positive_words = ' '.join(positive_words)
positive_words
Now it’s time to see how many positive words are there in “Reviews” from the
dataset by using the above code.
Copy Code
negative_words = []
for j in Negative.Review_clear:
negative_words.append(j)
negative_words = ' '.join(negative_words)
negative_words
Now it’s time to see how many negative words are there in “Reviews” from the
dataset by using the above code.
Copy Code
# Library for WordCloud
from wordcloud import WordCloud
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
wordcloud = WordCloud(background_color="white", max_words=len(negative_words))
wordcloud.generate(positive_words)
plt.figure(figsize=(13,13))
plt.imshow(wordcloud, interpolation="bilinear")
plt.axis("off")
plt.show()
By using the above code, we can simply show the word cloud of the most
common words in the Reviews column in the dataset.
So, Finally, we have done all concepts with theory and implementation of NLP in
Python…..!
Advantages of NLP
Removes unnecessary information.
NLP helps computers to interact with humans in their languages
Disadvantages of NLP
NLP may not show full context.
NLP is unpredictable sometimes.
Everyday NLP examples
There are many common day-to-day life applications of NLP. Apart from virtual
assistants like Alexa or Siri, here are a few more examples you can see.
Email filtering. Spam messages whose content is malicious get automatically
filtered by the Gmail system and put into the spam folder.
Autocorrection of any text by using techniques of NLP. Sometimes we see
that in mobile chat application or google search our word/sentence get
automatically autocorrected. This is because of NLP.
Text classification of tweets or reviews whether they are talking positively or
negatively in the text.
Conclusion
In this tutorial for beginners we understood that NLP, or Natural Language
Processing, enables computers to understand human languages through
algorithms like sentiment analysis and document classification. Using NLP,
fundamental deep learning architectures like transformers power advanced
language models such as ChatGPT. Therefore, proficiency in NLP is crucial for
innovation and customer understanding, addressing challenges like lexical and
syntactic ambiguity.
Python programming language, often used for NLP tasks, includes NLP
techniques like preprocessing text with libraries like NLTK for data cleaning.
Given the power of NLP, it is used in various applications like text summarization,
open source language models, text retrieval in search engines, etc.
demonstrating its pervasive impact in modern technology.
Key Takeaways
NLP (Natural Language Processing) revolutionizes human-computer
interaction, enabling machines to understand and interpret human languages
effectively.
NLP encompasses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Generation
(NLG), addressing challenges like lexical and syntactic ambiguity for accurate
interpretation and generation of text.
Python serves as a fundamental tool for NLP implementation, offering
libraries like NLTK for text preprocessing and data cleaning.
NLP finds extensive real-world applications including email filtering,
autocorrection, and text classification, driving innovation and automation
across industries.
The media shown in this article on Natural Language Processing are not owned
by Analytics Vidhya and is used at the Author’s discretion.
Amruta
I am Software Engineer, data enthusiast , passionate about data and its potential
to drive insights, solve problems and also seeking to learn more about machine
learning, artificial intelligence fields.
Advanced NLP Python Python Structured Data Text
Unsupervised
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Responses From Readers
What are your thoughts?...
Submit reply
Nirbhay Rana
Amruta could you please direct me to the good study
material for the NLU and NLG. I have deep interest in this
field but not able to find any good content on these.
sg
You have forgotten to include definitions of Negative and
Positive dataframes, otherwise its a good article
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