When working with NLP, one interesting tool that might help you with a wide range of tasks is NLTK. Some of its capabilities:

• Tokenization
• Stemming
• Part-of-speech Tagging
• Named Entity Recognition
• Sentence parsing
• Concordance
• Frequency Distribution
• Text Classification
• Sentiment Analysis

One extremely useful feature that has saved me good portion of time, is its large collection of text corpora for training your model.