Introducing Natural Language Processing
Why in the world would a network analysis book start with Natural Language Processing (NLP)?! I expect you to be asking yourself that question, and it’s a very good question. Here is why: we humans use language and text to describe the world around us. We write about the people we know, the things we do, the places we visit, and so on. Text can be used to reveal relationships that exist. The relationship between things can be shown via network visualization. It can be studied with network analysis.
In short, text can be used to extract interesting relationships, and networks can be used to study those relationships much further. We will use text and NLP to identify relationships and network analysis and visualization to learn more.
NLP is very useful for creating network data, and we can use that network data to learn network analysis. This book is an opportunity to learn a bit about NLP and network analysis, and how they can be used together.
In explaining NLP at a very high level, we will be discussing the following topics:
- What is NLP?
- Why NLP in a network analysis book?
- A very brief history of NLP
- How has NLP helped me?
- Common uses for NLP
- Advanced uses of NLP
- How can a beginner get started with NLP?
