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Natural Language Processing with Java and LingPipe Cookbook
Over 60 effective recipes to develop your Natural Language Processing (NLP) skills quickly and effectively
312 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 28, 2015
LingPipe is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) library that is released under a dual commercial and an open-source AGPL license, and is the basis for a NLP consulting company (Alias-I) that one of the authors (Breck Baldwin) founded. In fact, the preface of the book states that some of the recipes in this book come from Breck's private repository. This book is the first one devoted exclusively to LingPipe. While LingPipe provides comprehensive Javadocs and tutorials on its website, but it is fairly dense material (NLP is hard!) - the book is an easier, gentler way to understand it.
One other reason LingPipe's API is so dense (even compared to other Java NLP libraries) is because it is written for performance, making heavy use of encapsulation to wrap common tasks and the visitor pattern to consume data in streaming mode. The book does a good job explaining the latter pattern in some depth, and deconstructing the code examples so the former becomes more obvious. The book also covers class hierarchies of common NLP components (and their functionality) such as tokenizers and classifiers, which also helps in understanding the API.
LingPipe is a mature library and has components to do just about anything - notably tokenizers, classifiers (Naive Bayes, MaxEnt), Chunkers (HMM, CRF, rule based), clusterers (Single Link, Complete Link, LDA), etc. The book covers the use of these components through novel recipes, through which the authors share their NLP insights and experience with the reader. If you are serious about using LingPipe to solve your NLP problems and you don't have access to their consulting services (or even if you do), this book can help you get there.
The code examples are an integral part of the book, do download the code and run them and edit the code as you read the book. It aids in understanding the material and the code can serve as templates for your own work later. It would have been nice if a build script was provided with the code download, currently you are expected to build your code using your IDE.
There are a few typos in the book, but all fairly minor and unlikely to distract from your understanding. Overall, I thought it was a well-written and useful book which is long overdue. Not only did I learn a lot more about LingPipe than I previously knew, the book also gave me some ideas about how to go about solving some problems.
DISCLAIMER: I didn't purchase this book, PackT was looking for reviewers and I requested a review copy because I was interested in the subject.
More information about the book at http://bit.ly/1qDKvOI.
One other reason LingPipe's API is so dense (even compared to other Java NLP libraries) is because it is written for performance, making heavy use of encapsulation to wrap common tasks and the visitor pattern to consume data in streaming mode. The book does a good job explaining the latter pattern in some depth, and deconstructing the code examples so the former becomes more obvious. The book also covers class hierarchies of common NLP components (and their functionality) such as tokenizers and classifiers, which also helps in understanding the API.
LingPipe is a mature library and has components to do just about anything - notably tokenizers, classifiers (Naive Bayes, MaxEnt), Chunkers (HMM, CRF, rule based), clusterers (Single Link, Complete Link, LDA), etc. The book covers the use of these components through novel recipes, through which the authors share their NLP insights and experience with the reader. If you are serious about using LingPipe to solve your NLP problems and you don't have access to their consulting services (or even if you do), this book can help you get there.
The code examples are an integral part of the book, do download the code and run them and edit the code as you read the book. It aids in understanding the material and the code can serve as templates for your own work later. It would have been nice if a build script was provided with the code download, currently you are expected to build your code using your IDE.
There are a few typos in the book, but all fairly minor and unlikely to distract from your understanding. Overall, I thought it was a well-written and useful book which is long overdue. Not only did I learn a lot more about LingPipe than I previously knew, the book also gave me some ideas about how to go about solving some problems.
DISCLAIMER: I didn't purchase this book, PackT was looking for reviewers and I requested a review copy because I was interested in the subject.
More information about the book at http://bit.ly/1qDKvOI.
Displaying 1 of 1 review