Natural Language Processing for Beginners: Using TextBlob
Introduction
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of growing attention due to increasing number of applications like chatbots, machine translation etc. In some ways, the entire revolution of intelligent machines in based on the ability to understand and interact with humans.
I have been exploring NLP for some time now. My journey started with NLTK library in Python, which was the recommended library to get started at that time. NLTK is a perfect library for education and research, it becomes very heavy and tedious for completing even the simple tasks.
Later, I got introduced to TextBlob, which is built on the shoulders of NLTK and Pattern. A big advantage of this is, it is easy to learn and offers a lot of features like sentiment analysis, pos-tagging, noun phrase extraction, etc. It has now become my go-to library for performing NLP tasks.
On a side note, there is spacy, which is widely recognized as one of the powerful and advanced library used to implement NLP tasks. But having encountered both spacy and