Foundations of Natural Language Processing

What is NLP?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. It's the bridge between human communication and computer comprehension.

This program delves into the fundamental concepts and techniques that form the bedrock of modern NLP systems, from simple text analysis to complex language generation and understanding.

Key Concepts Covered:

• Text Preprocessing: Tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, stop word removal.
• Linguistic Fundamentals: Syntax, semantics, pragmatics, part-of-speech tagging.
• Language Modeling: N-grams, probability distributions, perplexity.
• Feature Extraction: Bag-of-Words, TF-IDF, word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe).
• Basic Classification Tasks: Sentiment analysis, spam detection.
• Introduction to Neural Networks for NLP: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks.

Why Learn NLP Foundations?

A strong understanding of NLP foundations is crucial for anyone looking to build intelligent systems that interact with humans through language. This includes developers, data scientists, researchers, and anyone passionate about the future of AI.

This course provides the essential knowledge to grasp more advanced NLP topics and technologies, paving the way for innovation in areas like chatbots, virtual assistants, machine translation, content analysis, and much more.