Natural Language Processing resources

In this page, I list resources that I have read/watched/learnt from and which will be good starting points for people who are interested in learning about Natural Language Processing. It is not intended to be comprehensive.

Books

This is a selection of books based on the ones I have read. NLP is one of those subjects where you would be better off starting with an approachable rather than a comprehensive book.

Taming Text

This is easily the most readable book on the topic of NLP and how you can use text analytics to improve your business processes. If you are going to read only one book on NLP from a business standpoint, this would be my recommendation.

I would love to see it updated for 2017 with some chapters focused on how Deep Learning/Machine Learning have impacted the field. Even without that, it is still a good book to learn the basics and as I have already pointed out, it makes a hard to explain subject very approachable.

NLTK Cookbook

This would be my next recommendation. Unlike Taming Text, which has very good topical organization, this is a cookbook with a collection of recipes.

However, this is a great book for learning about NLP because every single recipe gives an excellent introduction to the problem at hand. For people who like to learn from practical examples, it is a great starting point because you learn about the theory via practice.

About this website

BotFlo1 was created by Aravind Mohanoor as a website which provided training and tools for non-programmers who were2 building Dialogflow chatbots.

This website has now expanded into other topics in Natural Language Processing, including the recent Large Language Models (GPT etc.) with a special focus on helping non-programmers identify and use the right tool for their specific NLP task. 

For example, when not to use GPT

1 BotFlo was previously called MiningBusinessData. That is why you see that name in many videos

2 And still are building Dialogflow chatbots. Dialogflow ES first evolved into Dialogflow CX, and Dialogflow CX itself evolved to add Generative AI features in mid-2023