Natural language processing is a key component in many data science systems that must understand or reason about text. Common use cases include question answering, entity recognition, sentiment analysis, dependency parsing, de-identification, and natural language BI. Building such systems usually requires combining three types of software libraries: NLP annotation frameworks, machine learning frameworks, and deep learning frameworks. David Talby, Claudiu Branzan, and Alex Thomas lead a hands-on tutorial for scalable NLP using the highly performant, highly scalable open-source Spark NLP library. You’ll spend about half your time coding as you work through four sections, each with an end-to-end working codebase that you can change and improve.