nlp - natural language processing word association -

my project needs natural language processing. i'm new field.

what trying when user enter character, want list of english characters can follow specific character in order make legitimate word.

what specific term in nlp doing this? tried googling while, had no luck since don't know term. tutorials start with? there libraries in doing specific task?

thank you.

welcome nlp community.

the term you're looking query prediction or sentence prediction. example when type characters in google, starts prediction word/phrases might want search for. , behind technology, used both (a) language based heuristics , (b) user-based search history train model. call google instant, see http://www.google.com/insidesearch/

if you're looking sentence/word prediction, it's more when use phone there function helps type faster, technically, it's call autocomplete (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/autocomplete), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/autocomplete. modern day autocomplete makes use of nlp predict syntactically/semantically words follows type.

as @evan says, markov chain method of learning patterns training data , when testing system, can guess word accordingly whatever heuristics/statistical prediction have implemented. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/markov_chain