title: Parsing Meaning from Text
body: <p>I realize this is a broad topic, but I'm looking for a good primer on parsing meaning from text, ideally in Python. As an example of what I'm looking to do, if a user makes a blog post like:</p>
  
  <p>"Manny Ramirez makes his return for the Dodgers today against the Houston Astros",</p>
  
  <p>what's a light-weight/ easy way of getting the nouns out of a sentence? To start, I think I'd limit it to proper nouns, but I wouldn't want to be limited to just that (and I don't want to rely on a simple regex that assumes anything Title Capped is a proper noun).</p>
  
  <p>To make this question even worse, what are the things I'm not asking that I should be? Do I need a corpus of existing words to get started? What lexical analysis stuff do I need to know to make this work? I did come across <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/220187/algorithms-or-libraries-for-textual-analysis-specifically-dominant-words-phras">one other question</a> on the topic and I'm digging through those resources now.</p>