Although rigorous approaches to natural language processing (NLP) that include such things as sentence segmentation, tokenization, word chunking, and entity detection are necessary in order to achieve the deepest possible understanding of textual data, it’s helpful to first introduce some fundamentals from Information Retrieval theory. The remainder of this chapter introduces some of its more foundational aspects, including TF-IDF, the cosine similarity metric, and some of the theory behind collocation detection. Chapter 8 provides a deeper discussion of NLP.