Natural Language Processing Self- Learning Path

Hello to anyone reading this forum post.

My name is Mahima and I want to create a space to post about my journey to becoming a Natural -Language- Processing Engineer.

I will soon have a degree in Linguistics and Language studies and I am currently learning to code.

I belive that NLP (Natural Language Processing) is an interdisciplinary subfield of Linguistics and Computer Science, and I want to explore that further.

That is why I created this space, so that I can post about my findings and we can all discuss about our progress through this path. Let us explore an interesting field and motivate ourselves.
Welcome to Natural Language Processing!

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NLP can be used for several important tasks. From my knowledge, many key technological tools that require linguistic analysis utilize NLP and Machine Learning. Some examples of these tools are auto-correction features; auto-generated suggestions (for example on google search engine); voice-operated systems like Siri, and Alexa ; voice recognition for security features.
So as we can see, NLP plays an important role in many new defining technological tools.

Logic is one of the key subjects that is very useful in learning NLP in my opinion. I’ve already taken a Logic course in my Linguistics field but it is also useful while learning to code in Python Language.

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Python uses the NLTK (Natural Languge Toolkit). According to nltk.org, “NLTK is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data.”. The main processes that involve language pre-processing in context with NLTK are tokenization, parsing, lemmatization, stemming, noise removal, and a few others depending the language data.
One can get started on Natural Language Processing here on codecademy by looking up for NLP related courses or simply going on the home page’s search bar and typing in “Natural Languge Processing”.
It is very useful to get a hand on Python programming before getting started with NLP.

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These are some useful applications of NLP which I’ve extracted from Natural Language Processing: Python and NLTK
“Spell correction (MS Word/ any other editor)
Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, wolframalpha)
Speech engines (Siri, Google Voice)
Spam classifiers (All e-mail services)
News feeds (Google, Yahoo!, and so on)
Machine translation (Google Translate, and so on)
IBM Watson”

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Hi, thank you for creating the topic and sharing your insights. I have been working as a translator for several years, but I have always been interested in computational linguistics. I got to know what was NLP recently and started studying Python. I would love if you keep sharing about your findings!

For now, my immediate goal is to extract texts from webpages and documents and creating corpora, and using NLP to process it. My long-term goal is analysing corpora data to help making dictionary entries.

Hi, that’s very interesting! You are definitely beginning on the right track. I suggest you to continue on your journey to reach your goal of extracting texts and creating corpora and soon you will be able to reach your long-term goal as well. I wish you all the best and hope you come check into this forum post because I will keep adding more entries.

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Some books that are a good start-point for beggining the journey to natural language processing :
1)Introduction to the Mathematics of Language Michael Hammond
U. of Arizona
2)Speech and Language Processing Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin
3)An Introduction to the Theory of Formal Languages and Automata Willem Levelt
4) Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing Christopher D. Manning,
Hinrich Schutze

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Thank youi for your supportive reply and for sharing the books! I will add them to my reading list.
Right now, I am reading a Japanese introductory book on Python for NLP. I will be looking forward to reading those you posted soon

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This is a great list, I’m going to add these to my reading list.

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Some good resources to learn NLP on codecademy are:

  1. Build a Machine Learning Model with Python Skill Path
  2. Text Preprocessing
  3. Learn Python 3
  4. Data Scientist: Machine Learning Specialist
  5. Learn the Basics of Regular Expressions
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Link to the NLTK book website :
https://www.nltk.org/book/

This is a very useful and hands-on Natural Laguage Tool Kit (NLTK) based website that offers NLTK training for free. I hope you will find it to be helpful.

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There are some new very useful resources on codecademy for learning Natural Langugae Processing and its related topics. I will post the resources here just in case someone doesn’t have the knowledge yet:

  1. Get started with Data Science Career Specialization and start with Data Science Foundations.
  2. You can then head on to Data Scientist: Natural Language Processing Specialist.
  3. If you have the time you can then head on to Data Scientist: Machine Learning Specialist .
    All the above courses are found on the codecademy data science courses catalog.
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