IMG_20160720_195438 A concept tree example

Ontologies (an example of which is shown in the previous picture) let you create trees of concepts and relationships between them.


This was the fifth of the five meeting series on natural language processing, hosted by Women Who Code Austin at Rackspace. The instructor, Diana, introduced us to the basics of natural language processing. She did several demos of simple text analysis one can do with Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Examples of such actions are reading in the text, tokenizing it, and tagging parts of speech, which can involve a lot of interesting ambiguity.


Then we ventured deeper into natural language processing to discuss where and how it is used, including such fields as sentiment analysis. Diana talked about challenges present in those fields, such as for example determining similarity between concepts. We need to be able to handle that so as to extract accurate meanings from texts. This is where ontologies can be handy.


Here is my whole article on Natural Language Processing meeting series hosted by Women Who Code Austin.

July 2016