A Beginner's Guide to Natural Language Processing

What is NLP?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret, and manipulate human language. NLP draws from many disciplines, including computer science and computational linguistics.

Core NLP Tasks

Text Classification

Categorizing text into predefined groups, such as spam detection or sentiment analysis.

Named Entity Recognition

Identifying and classifying named entities (people, organizations, locations) in text.

Machine Translation

Automatically translating text from one language to another.

Question Answering

Building systems that can answer questions posed in natural language.

Getting Started

Popular libraries for NLP include NLTK, spaCy, and Hugging Face Transformers. Start with simple tasks like tokenization and part-of-speech tagging before moving to more complex applications.