A hands-on introduction to Natural Language Processing in Python

Abstract

This workshop introduces Natural Language Processing using Python. Attendees start off with textual data and learn how to process it to derive useful insights that can be used in real-world applications like sentiment analysis, document similarity, text summarization and chatbots.

Talk Description

With the advent of voice-based assistants and chatbots in our homes, our phones and our computers, businesses, stakeholders and developers want to learn about language processing. But how exactly do these devices understand human language? How can they interpret similar intents even when different words are used? What does Natural Language Processing mean and what are the steps involved?

This workshop introduces Natural Language Processing to those with some programming experience in Python. Attendees start off with textual data and learn how to process it to derive useful insights that can be used in real-world applications. Sample applications include sentiment analysis, topic modeling, similarity detection.

By the end of this tutorial, participants will be able to apply techniques of Natural language processing to textual datasets and create predictive models along with having sample projects to show in their portfolio. The vision is that participants feel motivated to create NLP-based applications and apply it to real-life examples like chatbots, analyze news sentiments, predicting gender from tweets.

About the Talk

About the Author

Grishma is a Cognitive Software Engineer with the Data Science for Marketing team at IBM Watson in San Francisco. She earned her Masters in Computer Science at University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests are in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. She was recently a mentor for AI4ALL's AI Project Fellowship Spring 2018 where she guided a group of high school students to use AI for prioritizing 911 EMS calls. In her free time, she writes, cooks and likes conducting workshops and delivering talks. She likes explaining things in an easy-to-understand format, drawing analogies from real-life (eg. using Uncle Scrooge to explain Greedy Algorithms https://medium.com/the-graph/uncle-scrooge-meets-greedy-algorithms-dfc80c33d7ac). https://www.linkedin.com/in/grishmajena/