Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer

We just started out one and a half week ago, joining the Pragmatic Programmer's writing month. We though a 'release early, release often' approach would be best, that's why there are just a few in-progress chapters.<p>We will keep you posted, and thanks for the encouragement!

It's an interesting paper that I intend to dig into more carefully, but I kind of wish that a paper "for the Working Programmer" used a language like Python rather than Haskell. I'm aware that Haskell has a very nice type system for doing things like this -- and I'm a language nerd myself, so It's not that -- but it just seems like it would be more <i>practical</i> in something more "mainstream."<p>That said, it is interesting from what I've read so far.

I've posted this link before, but these NLP posts keep popping up on HN, so I'll keep posting.<p>Over at <a href="http://www.repustate.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.repustate.com</a>, we're taking the more common functions that NLTK performs (and the ones it should) and porting them over as web services. NLTK is kind of buggy here &#38; there, and it's not too great if you're dealing with big data sets. Our API, with the obvious handicap of network latency, is lightning fast because we ported many NLTK functions down to raw C.<p>Our API is free so have at it, let me know if you want to see us add anything.

I'll have to put this on my 'to read' list, it looks really interesting. I think natural language processing/understanding may become one of those next 'big things' like mobile and social media simply because understanding what a user is trying to do will become very important.<p>If anyone is interested in playing around with a robust natural language processing tool, I built an API for the Stanford Parser. <a href="http://nlp.naturalparsing.com/browserparser/parse" rel="nofollow">http://nlp.naturalparsing.com/browserparser/parse</a>

Thanks Daniël, this is cool!<p>I am not a very good Haskel programmer, but I spend an occasional evening with it, and I am interested in NLP also (have been working off and on on NLP since the early 1980s).<p>From skimming through the book, it looks like a nice read and just went on my reading list.

This is pretty neat. At the risk of sounding childish, here I go -- I wish books like these could be given life like tryruby.org where you could try out examples and learn along the way. That would be wicked cool.<p>For now, OpenStudy will do the trick. I created a "StudyPad" if anyone wants to go through this book together. <a href="http://openstudy.com/studypads/Natural-Language-Processing-for-The-Working-Programmer-4ce2253e59fe3a7ffe5f6778" rel="nofollow">http://openstudy.com/studypads/Natural-Language-Processing-f...</a>

It's interesting to note that a lot of natural language processing is English-centered. It's clear that English natural language processing is way ahead of the curve, but based on the quality of Chinese results on Google Translate, I take it Asian languages don't do so hot when it comes to natural language processing?