If you’re anywhere near Fourth Corner next weekend (that’s Bellingham/Whatcom County in Washington State, for you outlanders), you may want to consider attending Linuxfest Northwest (LFNW), a 2-day showcase of open source and Linux technology at Bellingham Technical College.

Yours truly will be presenting Saturday from 11-12:30 in Haskell 204 on Natural Language Processing in Python using NLTK. Basically, i’ll be explaining and showing how some really great (and sophisticated) tools for processing language that used to be the exclusive province of PhDs in Computational Linguistics are now within reach of ordinary mortals (as long as those mortals know some Python: otherwise you’ll mostly be hearing about why you should learn Python!). I’m hoping it will also be a good introduction to what natural language processing is all about, and why programmers might care.

If NLP isn’t your thing, don’t tell me and burst my bubble, but there are still dozens of other really interesting sounding talks (including a couple in my timeslot that i’d go to if i were otherwise occupied!). I’m really looking forward to the weekend: come find me if you’re there! Al Castle also has a LFNW post on his blog (with a bit more background).

(i expect to post slides from my talk on the web afterwards, so even if you can’t come you can get some of the information.)