Introduction to Natural Language Processing

This section has just one tutorial, introducing you to NLP, discussing its applications, challenges and the various approaches to NLP.

Text Classification and TF-IDF

We first introduce TF-IDF (term frequency, inverse document frequency), a very commonly used measure in NLP to weigh the importance of different words. This helps us in search engine ranking (also called document retrieval), finding similar or related documents, and so on.

Then we move on to text classification (separating different types of documents into pre-defined categories), and use the learned concepts to implement sentiment classification from scratch. Lastly, we'll cover topic modeling (organizing documents into groups when pre-defined categories are not available).

Understanding Text Syntax and Structures

In this section, we will explore methods for understanding the syntax and structure of text. This sort of processing is important in-order to understand the meaning of sentences (in contrast to just predicting a category), and is used in applications like question answering and text summarization.

In the first tutorial, we'll see how to identify whether each individual word is a noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, etc, i.e. the part of speech. In the second, we'll see how to separate a sentence into noun phrases, verb phrases, and so on. Then, we'll see how to parse a sentence, which reveals not only the roles of individual words and phrases, but also the relation between them. Lastly, we'll see how to detect named entities in text, like people, places, companies, and so on.

Other Topics in NLP: Word Clouds, Language Identification and Spell Checking

Word Clouds are a great way of visualizing a document or a set of documents. You can see a word could for NLP at the top of this article.

Language Identification is the problem of identifying whether a given text is written in English, Spanish, French, etc. The last tutorial in this section describes an algorithm to perform automatic spelling correction. We'll implement both language identification and spelling correction in our hands-on assignments.

List of Project Ideas

This is a list of about 10 project ideas (with links to datasets and suggested algorithms). It is recommended that you do at-least one end-to-end project.

Bonus: Deep Learning approaches to NLP

Deep Learning is an advanced set of techniques in machine learning which has achieved state-of-art results in language translation, question answering, speech recognition and music composition and powers systems like the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

In this section, we'll first introduce core concepts in deep learning (2 tutorials + 1 quiz + 1 assignment), and then discuss deep learning methods for NLP (3 tutorials + 1 quiz + 1 project).

We didn't want to make this course too long, so the tutorials below might feel like they're going too fast. If you would like to learn deep learning and Deep NLP more throughly, see: Learn Deep Learning: From Beginner to Expert.