This volume explains the detection-based approach to investigating crosslinguistic influence and illustrates the value of the approach through a collection of five empirica studies that use the approach to quantify, evaluate, and isolate the influences of learners' native-language backgrounds on their English writing.

The majority of natural language processing (NLP) is English language processing, and while there is good language technology support for (standard varieties of) English, support for Albanian, Burmese, or Cebuano--and most other languages--remains limited. Being able to bridge this digital divide is important for scientific and democratic reasons but also represents an enormous growth potential. A key challenge for this to happen is learning to align basic meaning-bearing units of different languages. In this book, the authors survey and discuss recent and historical work on supervised and unsupervised learning of such alignments. Specifically, the book focuses on so-called cross-lingual word embeddings. The survey is intended to be systematic, using consistent notation and putting the available methods on comparable form, making it easy to compare wildly different approaches. In so doing, the authors establish previously unreported relations between these methods and are able to present a fast-growing literature in a very compact way. Furthermore, the authors discuss how best to evaluate cross-lingual word embedding methods and survey the resources available for students and researchers interested in this topic.

Many books and courses tackle natural language processing (NLP) problems with toy use cases and well-defined datasets. But if you want to build, iterate, and scale NLP systems in a business setting and tailor them for particular industry verticals, this is your guide. Software engineers and data scientists will learn how to navigate the maze of options available at each step of the journey. Through the course of the book, authors Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, and Harshit Surana will guide you through the process of building real-world NLP solutions embedded in larger product setups. You’ll learn how to adapt your solutions for different industry verticals such as healthcare, social media, and retail. With this book, you’ll: Understand the wide spectrum of problem statements, tasks, and solution approaches within NLP Implement and evaluate different NLP applications using machine learning and deep learning methods Fine-tune your NLP solution based on your business problem and industry vertical Evaluate various algorithms and approaches for NLP product tasks, datasets, and stages Produce software solutions following best practices around release, deployment, and DevOps for NLP systems Understand best practices, opportunities, and the roadmap for NLP from a business and product leader’s perspective

This book details patterns of language use that can be found in the writing of adult immigrant learners of Norwegian as a second language (L2). Each study draws its data from a single corpus of texts written for a proficiency test of L2 Norwegian by learners representing 10 different first language (L1) backgrounds. The participants of the study are immigrants to Norway and the book deals with the varying levels and types of language difficulties faced by such learners from differing backgrounds. The studies examine the learners’ use of Norwegian in relation to the morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic patterns they produce in their essays. Nearly all the studies in the book rely on analytical methods specifically designed to isolate the effects of the learners’ L1s on their use of L2 Norwegian, and every chapter highlights patterns that distinguish different L1 groups from one another.

The "Natural Language Processing Practical Approach" is a textbook that provides a practical introduction to the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The goal of the textbook is to provide a hands-on, practical guide to NLP, with a focus on real-world applications and use cases. The textbook covers a range of NLP topics, including text preprocessing, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text classification, and more. The textbook emphasizes the use of algorithms and models to solve NLP problems and provides practical examples and code snippets in various programming languages, including Python. The textbook is designed for students, researchers, and practitioners in NLP who want to gain a deeper understanding of the field and build their own NLP projects. The current state of NLP is rapidly evolving with advancements in machine learning and deep learning techniques. The field has seen a significant increase in research and development efforts in recent years, leading to improved performance and new applications in areas such as sentiment analysis, text classification, language translation, and named entity recognition. The future prospects of NLP are bright, with continued development in areas such as reinforcement learning, transfer learning, and unsupervised learning, which are expected to further improve the performance of NLP models. Additionally, increasing amounts of text data available through the internet and growing demand for human-like conversational interfaces in areas such as customer service and virtual assistants will likely drive further advancements in NLP. The benefits of a hands-on, practical approach to natural language processing include: 1. Improved understanding: Practical approaches allow students to experience the concepts and techniques in action, helping them to better understand how NLP works. 2. Increased motivation: Hands-on approaches to learning can increase student engagement and motivation, making the learning process more enjoyable and effective. 3. Hands-on experience: By working with real data and implementing NLP techniques, students gain hands-on experience in applying NLP techniques to real-world problems. 4. Improved problem-solving skills: Practical approaches help students to develop problem-solving skills by working through real-world problems and challenges. 5. Better retention: When students have hands-on experience with NLP techniques, they are more likely to retain the information and be able to apply it in the future. A comprehensive understanding of NLP would include knowledge of its various tasks, techniques, algorithms, challenges, and applications. It also involves understanding the basics of computational linguistics, natural language understanding, and text representation methods such as tokenization, stemming, and lemmatization. Moreover, hands-on experience with NLP tools and libraries like NLTK, Spacy, and PyTorch would also enhance one's understanding of NLP.

This text covers the technologies of document retrieval, information extraction, and text categorization in a way which highlights commonalities in terms of both general principles and practical concerns. It assumes some mathematical background on the part of the reader, but the chapters typically begin with a non-mathematical account of the key issues. Current research topics are covered only to the extent that they are informing current applications; detailed coverage of longer term research and more theoretical treatments should be sought elsewhere. There are many pointers at the ends of the chapters that the reader can follow to explore the literature. However, the book does maintain a strong emphasis on evaluation in every chapter both in terms of methodology and the results of controlled experimentation.

This ground-breaking text/reference diverges from the traditional view that computer vision (for image analysis) and string processing (for text mining) are separate and unrelated fields of study, propounding that images and text can be treated in a similar manner for the purposes of information retrieval, extraction and classification. Highlighting the benefits of knowledge transfer between the two disciplines, the text presents a range of novel similarity-based learning (SBL) techniques founded on this approach. Topics and features: describes a variety of SBL approaches, including nearest neighbor models, local learning, kernel methods, and clustering algorithms; presents a nearest neighbor model based on a novel dissimilarity for images; discusses a novel kernel for (visual) word histograms, as well as several kernels based on a pyramid representation; introduces an approach based on string kernels for native language identification; contains links for downloading relevant open source code.