Taming Text
by Grant Ingersoll, Thomas S. Morton, Drew Farris · first published 2012
75% recommend25% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Practical, code-heavy introduction to text search and NLP for working programmers, with little math; covers everything from naive approaches to what drives engines like Lucene.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Taming Text provides hands-on examples for working with unstructured text data. It covers techniques such as full-text search, named entity recognition, clustering, tagging, information extraction, and summarization. These techniques are demonstrated using real-world applications built with open-source libraries like Solr and Mahout. The book guides readers through each topic and its foundations in a clear and concise style without requiring background in statistics or natural language processing. It is written for Java developers but the concepts can be applied in any language.
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
Related books
2009–2023Natural Language Processing With Python
Edward Loper, Steven Bird, Ewan Klein
Recommended by 25 · mentioned by 2825 recommend · 28 mention25 recommend · 2825 recommend
2009–2024Introduction to information retrieval
Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, Hinrich Schütze
Recommended by 41 · mentioned by 4441 recommend · 44 mention41 recommend · 4441 recommend
2010–2025The Joy of Clojure
Michael Fogus, Chris Houser
Recommended by 72 · mentioned by 11772 recommend · 117 mention72 recommend · 11772 recommend
…your primary storage (cassandra, postgresql). At least that's how I used it. If there is any better alternative I'd like to know about it. edit: I highly recommend: http://www.manning.com/ingersoll/ Taming text by Ingersoll and it won Dr. Dobb award too as a good book.
on “Elasticsearch node crashes can cause data loss” ↗…the java libs from the NLP dept in Stanford) but at least you will get to know all the major concepts. Other interesting book, although not completely finished yet: http://www.manning.com/ingersoll/ Taming Text by Grant Ingersol, Thomas Morton and Drew Farris involved in the Apache Lucene / Mahout and OpenNLP communities.
on “Offer HN: Advice from PhD on NLP, machine learning, and data monetization” ↗Taming text http://www.amazon.com/Taming-Text-Find-Organize-Manipulate/d... Natural Language Processing with Python http://www.nltk.org/book/
on “Ask HN: What are some of the best written programming books?” ↗If you're a working programmer looking for a bit more depth on text searching, check out Taming Text by Ingersoll. It was written by some real pros, and it's very practical. It goes over everything from the first naive approaches to what drives many engines like Lucene today. https://www.amazon.com/Taming-Text-Find-Organize-Manipulate/...
on “The math and algorithms behind a search library” ↗My co-authors and I wrote "Taming Text" (https://www.manning.com/books/taming-text) specifically for programmers (there is little math, mostly code) interested in getting started in NLP. The examples are a bit dated at this point (2013 publication…
on “Ask HN: How Can I Get into NLP (Natural Language Processing)?” ↗…selection... - all the steps are defined and covered with practical examples. I strongly recommend this book if you are just starting out with ML and feel "lost" about how to start your own project. # Taming Text I decided to use text data I had available for my dissertation project. However, half-way through the book I realized my dataset was to small to apply any of the techniques described there. I still like…
on “A Junior Data Scientist Bookshelf (including Free Versions and HN Discussions)” ↗Agreed. I bought the MEAP for "Joy of Clojure" in August 2010, and the MEAP for "Taming Text" a couple of months later (November) -- no updates for either book since the initial purchase. I was glad to get the early content, but I've lowered my expectations for future dealings with Manning.
on “The Joy of The Joy of Clojure Closure” ↗…previous gaps have been implemented. BTW, the book Mahout in Action is a good guide but the new MEAP released last week does not cover some of the new features, which is OK. Also, Grant has been working on "Taming Text" for a while, but a new MEAP has not been released in a year or two - I would bet that his energies have been focused on extending and using Mahout.
on “Apache Mahout: Scalable machine learning for everyone” ↗