I’ve been remiss in posting here my lectures on the CLTK and related research over the past year. Since some of these repeat content, perhaps I should only post them when the materials reach a milestone of some sort. Here are the materials for two talks I gave late last year at Harvard:

The first, to the Arts and Humanities Research and Computing group, introduced the project, the in-development frontend (which was discussed by Luke Hollis), and some of my own personal research into genres of the Ancient Greek canon. The question guiding me was: Can AI classify texts better than the ancients did themselves? An intentionally naive question, however the research allows us to dissect the relative consistency of various genres in terms of lexical patterns, morphology, and syntax. I have always been concerned with handy-wavy definitions of genres, and the corresponding difficulty of quantitatively defining them. My hope is that this research will help to ground some such considerations of genre in early European literature.

The second was not so much a lecture as a hands-on introduction to using the CLTK. If you are looking for a comfortable introduction to NLP and the project, this might be the best place to start.