Chapter 1:

Easy, just using some API.

Important API : FreqDist(). 

Some natural language understanding technologies : Word Sense Disambiguation, Pronoun Resolution, Generating Languge Output, Machcine Translation, Spoken Dialogue Systems, Textual Entailment.

 

Chapter 2:

Learn to access text corpora and lexical resource.

Important API : ConditionalFreqDist(), words(), sents(),raw().

Corpora:

To get lexical resource :

WordNet (semantic oriented, large number of info about words)

WordList

StopWords

 

To get a collection of text(some with category):

Gutenberg

Brown

Web and Chat Text