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

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.

Grant Ingersoll is a founder of Lucid Imagination, developing search and natural language processing tools. Prior to Lucid Imagination, he was a Senior Software Engineer at the Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University. At the Center and, previously, at MNIS-TextWise, Grant worked on a number of text processing applications involving information retrieval, question answering, clustering, summarization, and categorization. Grant is a committer, as well as a speaker and trainer, on the Apache Lucene Java project and a co-founder of the Apache Mahout machine-learning project. He holds a master's degree in computer science from Syracuse University and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from Amherst College.

Thomas Morton writes software and performs research in the area of text processing and machine learning. He has been the primary developer and maintainer of the OpenNLP text processing project and Maximum Entropy machine learning project for the last 5 years. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005, and has worked in several industry positions applying text processing and machine learning to enterprise class development efforts. Currently he works as a software architect for Comcast Interactive Media in Philadelphia.

Drew Farris is a professional software developer and technology consultant whose interests focus on large scale analytics, distributed computing and machine learning. Previously, he worked at TextWise where he implemented a wide variety of text exploration, management and retrieval applications combining natural language processing, classification and visualization techniques. He has contributed to a number of open source projects including Apache Mahout, Lucene and Solr, and holds a master's degree in Information Resource Management from Syracuse University's iSchool and a B.F.A in Computer Graphics.