ABSTRACT
This chapter dives into the essence of natural language processing - what it is, how humans make sense of it, and how machines make sense of it. Many principles used to develop natural language processing algorithms take inspiration from the human process of understanding language. These include linguistic concepts such as form, syntax, semantics, and more. There are many well-known applications of natural language processing that use different linguistic concepts and language processing behind the scenes which are introduced. The goal of this chapter is to give background into natural language processing and link it with real-world applications. Several challenges are associated with processing language that impacts the results of natural language processing tasks. How a machine understands language happens through understanding these challenges and converting language to numerical representations. This involves preparing text data which is introduced in this chapter. Finally, set up criteria and introduction to commonly used Python tools along with installation are discussed.
