Regardless of the NLP task being performed or the NLP toolset being used, there are several steps that they all have in common. In this section, we will present these steps. As you go through the chapters and techniques presented in this book, you will see these steps repeated with slight variations. Getting a good understanding of them now will ease the task of learning the techniques.

The basic steps include the following:

1. Identifying the task
2. Selecting a model
3. Building and training the model
4. Verifying the model
5. Using the model

We will discuss each of these steps in the following sections.