Understanding NLP

NLP is a huge topic, and it is beyond the scope of this book to go into detail on the subject. However, in this section, we will go through the high-level details of NLP and try to understand the key concepts required to prepare and process the textual data using NLP, in order to make it ready for consumption by machine learning algorithms for prediction. 

Introducing NLP

Huge, unstructured textual data is getting generated on a daily basis. Social media, websites such as Twitter and Facebook, and communication apps, such as WhatsApp, generate an enormous volume of this unstructured data daily—not to mention the volume created by blogs, news articles, product reviews, service reviews, advertisements, emails, and SMS. So, to summarize, there is huge data (in TBS).

However, it is not possible for a computer to get any insight from this data and to carry out specific actions based on the insights, directly from this huge data, because of the following reasons:

• The data is unstructured...