Book: Natural Language Processing

In the first edition, we introduced the main concepts and tasks in this field, some of the most relevant applications today—particularly in Brazilian Portuguese—and some of the key techniques used to develop these tasks and applications. The topics covered in each chapter had the potential to be explored in greater depth in future editions, which is indeed what happened.

In the second, revised, and expanded edition, the content has been expanded to include six new chapters organized into twelve parts. Two new parts have been added: Interaction and Evaluation, two topics of paramount importance to the PLN.

In this third edition, some chapters have been expanded or updated, and this information appears immediately below the chapter title. Six new chapters have been added. The chapter on Joint Assessment in Portuguese (15 Joint Assessment in Portuguese) is part of the Data and Assessment section. The chapter presenting the different methods of natural language generation (16 Natural Language Generation) appears alongside the chapter on Language Models, in the section now called Generation and Models. The Applications section has gained another highly topical topic: the handling of fake news (27 Automatic Detection of Fake News). The “Domains” section now has three additional chapters, two of which pertain to the legal domain—named entity recognition (31 NLP in Law – REN) and automatic generation of case summaries (32 NLP in Law – Case Summaries)—and another on NLP applied to mental health (29 NLP in Mental Health).