ChatGPT amassed millions of users within a week of its launch, precisely 1 million in 5 days. Additionally, during the first quarter of 2024, artificial intelligence was the most talked-about topic on the internet. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world, and ChatGPT is its biggest achievement so far. But what’s the key behind it? Natural language processing. Hence, this blog lists 7 of the best NLP books for you to master this trending skill.

In a recent blog post on AI trends for 2024, we discussed the five most popular AI trends and how NLP stood out the most. But why should you read NLP books? It’s true that online tutorials and videos have become more popular than old-school books. However, the practicality, verified knowledge, and offline mode make learning from books a favorable option.

What can you expect from the listed NLP books?

Obviously you can expect to learn NLP in the best way possible, but how? We have thought of the following factors while curating this list:

1. Practicality: The practicality of lessons and teaching approach is what turns a normal book into a good one. Anyone can write theories and everyone can read theories. We all know that ‘Practise makes a man perfect’ and you learn things practically, not theoretically. Hence, we have picked best books on NLP with practical learning approaches.
2. Written language: English, obviously. But it’s not about that. By written language, we mean how well written is the article. Ideally, a written content should have school-level readability score. Hence, the NLP books on this list have an easy going written language.
3. Well researched: The internet is full of courses and tutorials teaching NLP in air without any ground or base. The NLP books on this list are well researched, grounded, and provide an overall learning of natural language processing from scratch.

7 Best NLP books for You

1. Speech and Language Processing

This book, “Speech and Language Processing” by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, is a comprehensive textbook that is widely regarded as one of the best resources for learning about natural language processing (NLP). It covers a wide range of topics, from basic linguistic concepts to advanced machine learning techniques for NLP.

The book is suitable for both beginners and advanced practitioners, providing clear explanations of complex topics along with practical examples and exercises. It also includes a wealth of real-world applications of NLP, such as machine translation, speech recognition, and information retrieval. Overall, “Speech and Language Processing” is an essential reference for anyone interested in NLP and its applications.

2. Natural Language Processing with Python

This is probably the best book on NLP that is equipped with the information which can help you write python scripts that work with large unstructured data. It’s been written by Steven Bird, Edward Loper, and Ewan Klein.

This book includes examples and exercises that show you how to extract information from unstructured text and classify named things. This book will teach you how to perform linguistic and semantic analyses on the texts.

Readers of this book can use well-known linguistic datasets like WordNet and treebanks. It directs you towards mastering the Natural Language Processing Toolkit (NLTK) open-source toolkit and practical NLP abilities. This book might be highly helpful and intriguing if you want to create web apps, analyze multilingual news sources, or are just interested in learning how language functions.

3. Practical Natural Language Processing (Best NLP Books)

Practical Natural Language Processing is an excellent choice for getting started with NLP. It’s one of the best books on NLP that takes you through the basics of building and scaling NLP systems in businesses. Sowmya Vajjala, Anju Gupta, Bodhisattwa Majumder, and Harshit Surana wrote it.

This book provides a defined path for developing practical NLP solutions. You can learn how to customize NLP solutions for social media and gain a better understanding of various problem formulations, tasks, and approaches to solutions offered by NLP.

Upon completing this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and frameworks to use deep machine learning techniques for implementing and testing various NLP applications. Your business issues can possibly get resolved after implementing the solutions that this book offers.

4. Deep Learning in NLP

The 4th on the list of best books on NLP is Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing, written by Li Deng and Yang Liu, covers the field of deep learning research and how it can be applied to NLP tasks such as speech recognition, lexical analysis, knowledge graphs, sentiment analysis, social computing, and parsing.

This book provides a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning research and how it is utilized in natural language processing, including all key tasks and methods.

Anyone interested in learning deep learning using natural language processing, including undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers, industrial researchers, lecturers, and readers can read this book.

5. Natural Language Processing with Java

The book “Natural Language Processing with Java” by Richard M. Reese and Ashish Singh Bhatia explores various strategies for classifying and extracting useful information from unstructured data. The book covers common Java libraries such as CoreNLP, OpenNLP, and Mallet.

By reading this book, you can learn the fundamentals of NLP and how it can be used to recognize patterns, brand names, unusual names, and other phrases. Additionally, the book teaches you how to use Java libraries for language analysis in order to better understand these phrases. After finishing the book, you will be able to perform tasks such as tokenization, parts of speech analysis, model training, and parsing sentence trees.

This book also covers topics such as summarization, advanced search techniques, dialogue systems, supervised and unsupervised NLP, and statistical machine translation.

6. Neural Network in Language Processing

The 6th best NLP book on our list is the Neural Network in Language Processing. It is an NLP book that provides in-depth information about neural networks and machine learning. It was written by Yoav Goldberg and Graeme Hirst. The first chapter of the book introduces supervised machine learning and feed-forward neural networks. It also discusses the use of vector-based representation of words instead of symbols and the fundamentals of machine learning.

In addition, the book instructs readers on how to define and train any kind of neural network using the computation-graph abstraction. It also explains more specialized neural network architectures, including 1D convolutional neural networks, conditioned generation models, recurrent neural networks, and attention-based models. These neural network topologies provide the foundation for the methods used in machine translation, syntactic parsing, and many other applications.

7. Introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP Books)

Jacob Eisenstein’s Introduction to Natural Language Processing looks at natural language processing from a scientific point of view. This book will teach you how to understand, change, and make up human words. It shows the modern methods that are based on data and use techniques from both supervised and unsupervised machine learning.

In the first part of the book, you learn the basics of machine learning by putting together a set of tools for word-based text analysis. In the second part, sequences, trees, and graphs are used to show how language is organised. The third part talks about the different ways that language meaning can be represented and analysed. These ways range from formal logic to neural word embeddings. In the last part of the book, each of three transformative uses of natural language processing—information extraction, text creation, and machine translation—is covered in its own chapter.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in mastering the increasingly popular field of natural language processing (NLP), this blog can help. It emphasizes the importance of NLP and lists seven of the best NLP books for practical and well-researched learning. The blog highlights the practicality, written language, and well-researched content of the books on the list, making them ideal resources for both beginners and advanced practitioners.

Whether you’re looking to build and scale NLP systems in businesses or simply want to learn how language functions, these NLP books are an essential resource for your journey.

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