This textbook provides a contemporary and comprehensive overview of Natural Language Processing (NLP), covering fundamental concepts, core algorithms, and key applications such as AI chatbots, Large Language Models and Generative AI. Additionally, it includes seven step-by-step NLP workshops, totaling 14 hours, that offer hands-on practice with essential Python tools, including NLTK, spaCy, TensorFlow, Keras, Transformers, and BERT.

The objective of this book is to provide readers with a fundamental grasp of NLP and its core technologies, and to enable them to build their own NLP applications (e.g. Chatbot systems) using Python-based NLP tools. It is both a textbook and NLP tool-book intended for the following readers: undergraduate students from various disciplines who want to learn NLP; lecturers and tutors who want to teach courses or tutorials for undergraduate/graduate students on NLP and related AI topics; and readers with various backgrounds who want to learn NLP, and more importantly, to build workable NLP applications after completing its 14 hours of Python-based workshops.