Get Started with NLP With Our New Introduction to NLP Course

A lot goes into learning a new skill, regardless of how in-depth it is. Getting started with natural language processing (NLP) is no exception, as you need to be savvy in machine learning, deep learning, language, and more. Especially now with the growth of generative AI and prompt engineering — both skills that use NLP — now’s a good time to get into the field while it’s hot with this introduction to NLP course.

To get you started on your journey, we’ve released a new on-demand Introduction to NLP course. This 7-part course will give you everything you need to get started learning NLP, including ML for NLP, tokenization, and more. Here are some more details.

Tokenization and Stop Word Removal

The course begins by laying the foundation with tokenization and stop word removal, crucial preprocessing tasks in NLP. Here, you’ll understand how to break text into meaningful units, i.e., tokens, and remove frequently occurring words, known as stop words, which often add little semantic value. These steps are critical in reducing the complexity of the text data and preparing it for further processing.

Stemming and Lemmatization

In the second part, the focus shifts to stemming and lemmatization — techniques that trim words down to their root forms. You’ll learn to reduce inflected or derived words systematically, minimizing the overall vocabulary space and making subsequent analysis more manageable and efficient.

Counting-Based Embeddings

Next, the course introduces counting-based embeddings, which map words to high-dimensional vectors based on their co-occurrence statistics. You’ll grasp how these techniques, such as TF-IDF and co-occurrence matrices, can capture semantic and syntactic relationships between words, facilitating their numerical representation for downstream tasks.

Neural Network-Based Embeddings

The fourth part delves into neural network-based embeddings, including word2vec and GloVe, that provide dense and compact representations of words. You’ll see how these models can outperform counting-based methods by better-capturing language’s semantic subtleties and complexities.

Classic Machine Learning in NLP

The following section explores how traditional machine learning algorithms can be applied to NLP tasks. In this introduction to NLP course, you’ll learn about algorithms such as Naive Bayes, SVMs, and decision trees and understand how to use them for text classification, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and more.

Deep Learning for NLP

The sixth part of the course is dedicated to deep learning for NLP, where you’ll learn about powerful models like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Short-Term Long Memory (LSTM) units, and Transformer architecture. This section will equip you with knowledge on how to build more advanced, robust models that can handle complex NLP tasks such as machine translation, question-answering, and named entity recognition.

Large Language Models

Finally, the course concludes with a look at large language models, such as BERT, ELMo, GPT, and ULMFiT. You’ll discover how these models, equipped with the power of transfer learning, can yield state-of-the-art results on a wide array of NLP tasks, even with limited data.

NLP is an integral part of AI and holds numerous practical applications across industries, from chatbots and search engines to sentiment analysis and content recommendation. By understanding and mastering these concepts in this introduction to NLP course, you’ll gain valuable skills and open doors to a wealth of career opportunities in the ever-evolving field of AI.

How to Get Started With Our New Introduction to NLP Course

Whether you’re an AI enthusiast keen to expand your knowledge, a data scientist looking to specialize in NLP, or a seasoned NLP practitioner desiring to stay current with the latest developments, this introduction to NLP course is for you. It offers a well-rounded perspective on NLP, comprehensive content, and hands-on exercises to fortify learning — making it a valuable addition to your learning repertoire.

Unlock the power of language, learn how machines can understand, interpret, and generate human language, and embark on this exciting journey into the world of NLP.

Sign up for Ai+ Training and get started with learning NLP today!

Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com

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