Natural Language Processing: The Complete Guide

What is Natural Language Processing?

NLP is a branch of AI that helps computers understand, interpret, and generate human language. It bridges the gap between human communication and computer understanding.

Core NLP Tasks

Text Preprocessing

Tokenization

Stemming/Lemmatization

Stop word removal

Part-of-speech tagging

Language Understanding

Named Entity Recognition

Sentiment Analysis

Intent Classification

Semantic Parsing

Language Generation

Text summarization

Machine translation

Question answering

Content generation

NLP Pipeline

Text input

Preprocessing

Feature extraction

Model inference

Post-processing

Output

Key Technologies

Traditional Methods

Bag of Words

TF-IDF

Word2Vec

GloVe

Deep Learning

Recurrent Neural Networks

LSTM/GRU

Attention mechanisms

Transformers

Large Language Models

BERT

GPT

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Applications

Chatbots and virtual assistants

Search engines

Translation services

Content moderation

Document analysis

Voice assistants

Getting Started

Learn Python basics

Study NLP libraries (NLTK, spaCy)

Understand deep learning fundamentals

Explore transformer architectures

Practice with real projects

Conclusion

NLP is at the heart of many AI applications we use daily. Understanding its principles opens doors to building powerful language-based solutions.