These are the days of generative AI which performs natural language processing functions. You must have come across chatGPT and must have experienced its magic. That makes you interested in natural language processing or NLP.

How can you go about to gain knowledge about NLP?

1. As a first step, you must learn Python and Machine Learning basics. In ML basics, you must know about data pre-processing, exploration, evaluation and selection. Get familiar with both supervised and unsupervised learning. ML in Python’s library is Scikit-learn.

2. Move to deep learning fundamentals by learning about neural networks and the way they process data. Here you should learn the concepts of activation, loss and optimization in training the neural network.

After forward pass, the backpropagation is used in neural networks Gradient decent is used as an optimization. Make yourself familiar with TensorFlow and PyTorch.

3.It is time for you to understand tokenization of words. Also read about stemming and lemmatization –these techniques reduce words to their root forms.

NLP consists of several tasks — sentiment analysis, machine translation, question-answer and so on.

Learn about part-of-speech tagging and named entry recognition.

You should know the characteristics of a language — syntax, semantics, dependency parsing.

4. Traditional techniques prior to deep learning such as Bag of Words, conversion of data into numerical form and nGrams were used.

5. Learn about word embeddings using Word2Vec. Learn about Glove too. Learn about RNNS, CNNs, Long Short Term Memory (LSTM).

6. Learn about Transformers, and attention mechanism.