Open Thread, May 19 - 25, 2014

somnicule

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Previous Open Thread

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

Do you have a recommendation for a good language-agnostic text / reference resource on NLP?

ETA: my own background is a professional programmer with a reasonable (undergrad) background in statistics. I've dabbled with machine learning (I'm in the process of developing this as a skill set) and messed around with python's nltk. I'd like a broader conceptual overview of NLP.

I'd recommend this book for a general overview : http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/

However, tasks like parsing are unnecessary for many tasks. A simple classifier on a sparse vector of word counts can be quite effective as a starting point in classifying sentence/document content.