Baldwin Breck - Natural Language Processing with Java and LingPipe Cookbook over 60 effective recipes to develop your Natural Language Processing (NLP) skills quickly and effectively

Breck Baldwin is the Founder and President of Alias-i/LingPipe. The company focuses on system building for customers, education for developers, and occasional forays into pure research. He has been building large-scale NLP systems since 1996. He enjoys telemark skiing and wrote DIY RC Airplanes from Scratch: The Brooklyn Aerodrome Bible for Hacking the Skies , McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics .

This book is dedicated to Peter Jackson, who hired me as a consultant for Westlaw, before I founded the company, and gave me the confidence to start it. He served on my advisory board until his untimely death, and I miss him terribly.

Fellow Aristotelian, Bob Carpenter, is the architect and developer behind the LingPipe API. It was his idea to make LingPipe open source, which opened many doors and led to this book.

Mitzi Morris has worked with us over the years and has been instrumental in our challenging NIH work, the author of tutorials, packages, and pitching in where it was needed.

Jeff Reynar was my office mate in graduate school when we hatched the idea of entering the MUC-6 competition, which was the prime mover for creation of the company; he now serves our advisory board.

Our volunteer reviewers deserve much credit; Doug Donahue and Rob Stupay were a big help. Packt Publishing reviewers made the book so much better; I thank Karthik Raghunathan, Altaf Rahman, and Kshitij Judah for their attention to detail and excellent questions and suggestions.

Our editors were the ever patient; Ruchita Bhansali who kept the chapters moving and provided excellent commentary, and Shiny Poojary, our thorough technical editor, who suffered so that you don't have to. Much thanks to both of you.

I could not have done this without my co-author, Krishna, who worked full-time and held up his side of the writing.

Many thanks to my wife, Karen, for her support throughout the book-writing process.

Krishna Dayanidhi has spent most of his professional career focusing on Natural Language Processing technologies. He has built diverse systems, from a natural dialog interface for cars to Question Answering systems at (different) Fortune 500 companies. He also confesses to building those automated speech systems for very large telecommunication companies. He's an avid runner and a decent cook.

I'd like to thank Bob Carpenter for answering many questions and for all his previous writings, including the tutorials and Javadocs that have informed and shaped this book. Thank you, Bob! I'd also like to thank my co-author, Breck, for convincing me to co-author this book and for tolerating all my quirks throughout the writing process.

I'd like to thank the reviewers, Karthik Raghunathan, Altaf Rahman, and Kshitij Judah, for providing essential feedback, which in some cases changed the entire recipe. Many thanks to Ruchita, our editor at Packt Publishing, for guiding, cajoling, and essentially making sure that this book actually came to be. Finally, thanks to Latha for her support, encouragement, and tolerance.

Karthik Raghunathan is a scientist at Microsoft, Silicon Valley, working on Speech and Natural Language Processing. Since first being introduced to the field in 2006, he has worked on diverse problems such as spoken dialog systems, machine translation, text normalization, coreference resolution, and speech-based information retrieval, leading to publications in esteemed conferences such as SIGIR, EMNLP, and AAAI. He has also had the privilege to be mentored by and work with some of the best minds in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, such as Prof. Christopher Manning, Prof. Daniel Jurafsky, and Dr. Ron Kaplan.

Karthik currently works at the Bing Speech and Language Sciences group at Microsoft, where he builds speech-enabled conversational understanding systems for various Microsoft products such as the Xbox gaming console and the Windows Phone mobile operating system. He employs various techniques from speech processing, Natural Language Processing, machine learning, and data mining to improve systems that perform automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding. The products he has recently worked on at Microsoft include the new improved Kinect sensor for Xbox One and the Cortana digital assistant in Windows Phone 8.1. In his previous roles at Microsoft, Karthik worked on shallow dependency parsing and semantic understanding of web queries in the Bing Search team and on statistical spellchecking and grammar checking in the Microsoft Office team.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Karthik graduated with an MS degree in Computer Science (specializing in Artificial Intelligence), with a distinction in Research in Natural Language Processing from Stanford University. While the focus of his graduate research thesis was coreference resolution (the coreference tool from his thesis is available as part of the Stanford CoreNLP Java package), he also worked on the problems of statistical machine translation (leading Stanford's efforts for the GALE 3 Chinese-English MT bakeoff), slang normalization in text messages (codeveloping the Stanford SMS Translator), and situated spoken dialog systems in robots (helped in developing speech packages, now available as part of the open source Robot Operating System (ROS)).

Karthik's undergraduate work at the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, focused on building NLP systems for Indian languages. He worked on restricted domain-spoken dialog systems for Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi in collaboration with IIIT, Hyderabad. He also interned with Microsoft Research India on a project that dealt with scaling statistical machine translation for resource-scarce languages.