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 introduction to 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.