This document introduces the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), an open source library for natural language processing (NLP) in Python. It discusses key NLP concepts like part-of-speech tagging, parsing, stemming, and gives examples of how to use NLTK for tasks like corpus exploration, frequency analysis, and tagging. The document also outlines some challenges in NLP like ambiguity from stress in speech and highlights NLTK's goals of making NLP easy to use through its corpora and functions.