afterword A. Afterword: The Language Challenge

Natural language throws up some interesting computational challenges. We’ve explored many of these in the preceding chapters, including tokenization, tagging, classification, information extraction, and building syntactic and semantic representations. You should now be equipped to work with large datasets, to create robust models of linguistic phenomena, and to extend them into components for practical language technologies. We hope that the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) has served to open up the exciting endeavor of practical natural language processing to a broader audience than before.

In spite of all that has come before, language presents us with far more than a temporary challenge for computation. Consider the following sentences which attest to the riches of language: