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Why Python NLTK Will Play A Major Role In The Future

Python’s Natural Language Toolkit (nltk) is a powerful library that provides easy-to-use interfaces for working with human language data. As we move forward into the future, the role of artificial intelligence and machine learning in comprehending, processing, and interacting with natural languages is becoming increasingly significant. This is due to several reasons:

1. The rapid growth of digital data

– Every day, massive amounts of text-based data are generated through various platforms such as social media, blogs, news articles, and online forums.
– Companies and organizations see value in analyzing this data to gain insights, improve products, or understand customer behavior.
– Python’s nltk library can help in processing and understanding this tremendous wealth of information by allowing developers to build complex natural language processing (NLP) applications with ease.

One of the guides I used to understand the NLTK Python libraries are referenced below, there’s a good amount of examples for most of the use-cases we will talk about:

NLTK Python Guide To Extract Names

2. Rise in chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants

– Businesses are investing in virtual assistants and chatbots for personalized customer support, market research, and automating tasks.
– One of the main requirements for successful implementation of these virtual assistants is seamless communication using natural language as input.
– With its extensive capabilities, Python’s nltk plays a vital role in constructing models that can understand different dialects, sentiments, and contexts, which makes interactions between humans and machines more seamless.

3. Need for sentiment analysis in various industries

– Sentiment analysis helps companies better understand their customers’ opinions regarding products, services, or overall brand image.
– Tools powered by Python’s nltk enable businesses to quickly determine the mood of their customers based on text received.
– By leveraging advanced algorithms for sentiment analysis, businesses can make informed decisions and respond effectively to customer feedback.

4. Enhancement of Machine Translation systems

– In our increasingly connected world, effective machine translation systems play a significant role in bridging language barriers.
– Python’s nltk library aids developers in building sophisticated machine translation algorithms that tackle the complexities of grammar, context, and idiomatic expressions in various languages.

5. Automation of content generation and summarization

– Companies that need to produce large volumes of written content or summarize data from diverse sources can benefit greatly from automated content generation tools and summarizers.
– Python’s nltk comes with various functionalities, making it easier for developers to build such automated systems by understanding linguistic structures and producing coherent outputs in the target language.

To provide a clearer perspective on how Python’s nltk library can be leveraged for these purposes, here are ten coding examples:

1. Tokenization

python

import nltk

nltk.download(“punkt”)  # Downloading the tokenizer dataset

text = “This is an example sentence. Here’s another sentence!”

tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(text)

print(tokens)

2. Part-of-speech (POS) tagging

python

import nltk

nltk.download(‘averaged_perceptron_tagger’)

text = “The cat is sitting on the mat.”

tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(text)

tagged_tokens = nltk.pos_tag(tokens)

print(tagged_tokens)

3. Named Entity Recognition (NER)

python

import nltk

nltk.download(‘maxent_ne_chunker’)

nltk.download(‘words’)

text = “Apple Inc. is headquartered in Cupertino, California.”

tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(text)

tagged_tokens = nltk.pos_tag(tokens)

named_entities = nltk.ne_chunk(tagged_tokens)

print(named_entities)

4. Stopword removal

python

from nltk.corpus import stopwords

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

nltk.download(‘stopwords’)

text = “This is an example sentence containing stopwords.”

tokens = word_tokenize(text)

filtered_tokens = [token for token in tokens if token.lower() not in stopwords.words(‘english’)]

print(filtered_tokens)

5. Stemming

python

from nltk.stem import PorterStemmer

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

stemmer = PorterStemmer()

text = “leaves, cooking, projects”

tokens = word_tokenize(text)

stemmed_tokens = [stemmer.stem(token) for token in tokens]

print(stemmed_tokens)

6. Lemmatization

python

from nltk.stem import WordNetLemmatizer

from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize

nltk.download(‘wordnet’)

lemmatizer = WordNetLemmatizer()

text = “books, children, mice”

tokens = word_tokenize(text)

lemmatized_tokens = [lemmatizer.lemmatize(token) for token in tokens]

print(lemmatized_tokens)

7. Sentence segmentation

python

import nltk

nltk.download(‘punkt’)

text = “This is an example sentence. Here’s another sentence!”

sentences = nltk.sent_tokenize(text)

print(sentences)

8. Sentiment analysis

python

from nltk.sentiment import SentimentIntensityAnalyzer

nltk.download(‘vader_lexicon’)

sia = SentimentIntensityAnalyzer()

text = “I am extremely happy and excited about this new project!”

sentiment_score = sia.polarity_scores(text)

print(sentiment_score)

9. Cosine similarity calculation

python

from nltk.corpus import stopwords

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer

from sklearn.metrics.pairwise import cosine_similarity

nltk.download(‘stopwords’)

docs = [

    “I love apples, oranges, and bananas.”,

    “She likes oranges and berries.”,

    “We enjoy apples and berries at breakfast.”

]

vectorizer = TfidfVectorizer(stop_words=stopwords.words(“english”))

tfidf_matrix = vectorizer.fit_transform(docs)

cosine_sim = cosine_similarity(tfidf_matrix)

print(cosine_sim)

10. Text summarization

python

!pip install sumy

from sumy.parsers.plaintext import PlaintextParser

from sumy.nlp.tokenizers import Tokenizer

from sumy.summarizers.lex_rank import LexRankSummarizer

nltk.download(‘punkt’)

text = ”’

  In this tutorial, we will learn how to develop a simple Python-based demo application.

  The purpose of the demo is to teach basic programming concepts using Python, one of the most popular programming languages. 

  We will also discuss various libraries such as NumPy, pandas, and matplotlib, which will help you perform different operations on data.

”’

parser = PlaintextParser.from_string(text, Tokenizer(“english”))

summarizer = LexRankSummarizer()

summary = summarizer(parser.document, sentences_count=2)

for sentence in summary:

    print(sentence)

For further comprehension of Python’s nltk, study the official documentation (https://www.nltk.org/) and other resources such as introductory NLP books, video tutorials on YouTube, and specialized courses on platforms like Coursera or Udemy.

ABHIYAN
the authorABHIYAN
Abhiyan Chhetri is a cybersecurity journalist with a passion for covering latest happenings in cyber security and tech world. In addition to being the founder of this website, Abhiyan is also into gaming, reading and investigative journalism.