Taming Text: How to Find, Organize, and Manipulate It

by Grant S. Ingersoll, Thomas S. Morton, Drew Farris

It is no secret that the world is drowning in text and data. This causes real problems for everyday users who need to make sense of all the information available, and for software engineers who want to make their text-based applications more useful and user-friendly. Whether building a search engine for a corporate website, automatically organizing email, or extracting important nuggets of information from the news, dealing with unstructured text can be daunting.

Taming Text is a hands-on, example-driven guide to working with unstructured text in the context of real-world applications. It explores how to automatically organize text, using approaches such as full-text search, proper name recognition, clustering, tagging, information extraction, and summarization. This book gives examples illustrating each of these topics, as well as the foundations upon which they are built.

Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

Genres: Programming, Technology, Computer Science, Reference, Computers, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering

322 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2011

Reviews

[Alex Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of different systems (Solr, OpenNLP & Mahout), approaches & algorithms for working with (unstructured) text - search, analyze, cluster, etc.
The book itself is completely practical with references to articles & books for people interested in more detailed/theoretical information.

[Nigel Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the state of the art about ten years ago. Still an interesting overview. _Very_ Java based.

[Ashish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is like a hands on guide to Text Analytics and Processing as it talks about the Open Source projects related to this topic. Other than that it is a very good introduction to basics of Text Analysis and how one can use Open Source Solutions like Lucene, Solr, OpenNLP etc to do the same.


The last chapter about Untamed text: the next frontier is very good. For someone interested in Text Processing and Analytics that last chapter is a very good read with a lots of ideas regarding what could be done next in this field.

[Zac · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was alright. Many of the theoretical bits are things I've already encountered. The practical bits weren't so relevant because they were too tightly coupled to specific Java libraries and other pieces of software. Nothing too earth shattering here, but might be just right for some readers.

[Vuk Trifkovic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit scattergun, a bit basic, but sound introduction to text handling.

[Dgg32 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice introduction to the field natural language programming. May come in handy for some of my projects.

[Akshay Ratan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good for understanding content analysis using efficient techniques. Apache Solr and Lucene explained with concepts and codes.