Doctor Dolittle NLP

This is the first post from Data Dolittle, a data analytics company that looks to empower other data scientists and businesses looking to capture insight from their data. What better way to start than with a post about natural language processing (NLP) using Hugh Lofting?s Doctor Dolittle.

Requirements

• Python 3

• NLTK

pip install nltk

• request

pip install requests

• matplotlib

pip install matplotlib

• Beautiful Soup

pip install bs4

Optional

• PIL

pip install Pillow

• wordcloud

pip install wordcloud

Goals:

Once upon a time, there was a solider in the trenches of WWI. The horrors of war weighed heavy upon his shoulders. Day in and day out, he was subjected to the worst of humanity in dangerous conditions. It was his young daughter that broke the drudge of trench warfare providing a reason to carry on. The short and infrequent commutations with the solider?s daughter left the solider with a desire to engage in a more meaningful way. The solider wanted to create a world for his daughter, a world better than the reality he was living. The solider created a hero like no other, a hero to all those traditionally silenced, the animals. This solider?s name was Hugh Lofting and in creating Doctor Dolittle, Hugh created a world to provide hope to his daughter and countless other children around the world. Doctor Dolittle provided an escape for the author as much as the target audience. Hugh dreamed up a perfectly idyllic town Puddleby-on-the-Marsh as the opening setting that takes the protagonist on a fantastical journey to far away lands all the while creating unique interactions with engaging characters. It is these characters that make our good Doctor unique. You see, Doctor Dolittle is taught the secrets of animal language by his trusty translator, Polynesia. Polynesia is a parrot capable of both human speech and animal speech. The Doctor?s newly acquired skills lead him to alienate humanity to protect animals across the globe. This focus away from humanity may have been in response to Hugh?s experiences of mankind in the trenches. Here we explore the details of Hugh?s imaginative world, exploring the language used, the sentiment of the chapters, the frequency of each animal?s appearance, and try to match historical data with chapters to search for hidden messages from the trenches. Follow us on our own journey through the world of Doctor Dolittle!