Natural Language Processing in Groovy: A Primer – Using Groovy for processing and analysing textual data

The May issue of GroovyMag, an online-only magazine for everything Groovy and Grails has been published today.

I’ve contributed an article about doing natural language processing with Groovy. Here’s a teaser:

Given that most Internet content in way or another contains natural language, then it’s no surprise natural language processing (NLP) and text mining have become a vital aspect of many Internet applications – from large scale search engines to social media apps. Making sense of the content that is stored in your application can make all the difference. Groovy’s regular expression, text processing abilities and readily available NLP libraries for Java make it a natural match for processing large amounts of text.

Since its inception Perl, the language that arguably can be considered the first scripting language in modern terms, had the features necessary to conveniently process large amounts of text built right into the language. Fortunately, most scripting languages that followed Perl borrowed and inherited many of these useful features. This is why things like methods for reading texts and regular expressions are commonplace in Python, Ruby and, of course, Groovy too.

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Read the rest of this article at GroovyMag.

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