Introduction

Mining the data is often the most interesting part of the job, and text is one of the most common data sources. We will be using the NLTK toolkit to introduce common natural language processing concepts and statistical models. Not only do we want to find quantitative data, such as numbers within data that we have scraped, we also want to be able to analyze various characteristics of textual information. This analysis of textual information is often lumped into a category known as natural language processing (NLP). There exists a library for Python, NLTK, that provides rich capabilities. We will investigate several of it's capabilities.