NLP Boot Camp / Hands-on Natural Language Processing

The Hands-on Natural Language Processing (NLP) Boot Camp is an immersive, three-day course that serves as your guide to building machines that can read and interpret human language. NLP is a unique interdisciplinary field, blending computational linguistics with artificial intelligence to help machines understand, interpret, and generate human language. In an increasingly data-driven world, NLP skills provide a competitive edge, enabling the development of sophisticated projects such as voice assistants, text analyzers, chatbots, and so much more.

Our comprehensive curriculum covers a broad spectrum of NLP topics. Beginning with an introduction to NLP and feature extraction, the course moves to the hands-on development of text classifiers, exploration of web scraping and APIs, before delving into topic modeling, vector representations, text manipulation, and sentiment analysis. Half of your time is dedicated to hands-on labs, where you'll experience the practical application of your knowledge, from creating pipelines and text classifiers to web scraping and analyzing sentiment. These labs serve as a microcosm of real-world scenarios, equipping you with the skills to efficiently process and analyze text data. Time permitting, you ll also explore modern tools like Python libraries, the OpenAI GPT-3 API, and TensorFlow, using them in a series of engaging exercises.

By the end of the course, you'll have a well-rounded understanding of NLP, and will leave equipped with the practical skills and insights that you can immediately put to use, helping your organization gain valuable insights from text data, streamline business processes, and improve user interactions with automated text-based systems. You ll be able to process and analyze text data effectively, implement advanced text representations, apply machine learning algorithms for text data, and build simple chatbots.

Day 1

1. Launch into the Universe of Natural Language Processing

• The journey begins: Unravel the layers of NLP
• Navigating through the history of NLP
• Merging paths: Text Analytics and NLP
• Decoding language: Word Sense Disambiguation and Sentence Boundary Detection
• First steps towards an NLP Project

2. Unleashing the Power of Feature Extraction

• Dive into the vast ocean of Data Types
• Purification process: Cleaning Text Data
• Excavating knowledge: Extracting features from Texts
• Drawing connections: Finding Text Similarity through Feature Extraction

Day 2

3. Engineer Your Text Classifier

• The new era of Machine Learning and Supervised Learning
• Architecting a Text Classifier
• Constructing efficient workflows: Building Pipelines for NLP Projects
• Ensuring continuity: Saving and Loading Models

4. Master the Art of Web Scraping and API Usage

• Stepping into the digital world: Introduction to Web Scraping and APIs
• The great heist: Collecting Data by Scraping Web Pages
• Navigating through the maze of Semi-Structured Data

Day 3

5. Unearth Hidden Themes with Topic Modeling

• Embark on the path of Topic Discovery
• Decoding algorithms: Understanding Topic-Modeling Algorithms
• Dialing the right numbers: Key Input Parameters for LSA Topic Modeling
• Tackling complexity with Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP)

6. Delving Deep into Vector Representations

• The Geometry of Language: Introduction to Vectors in NLP

7. Text Manipulation: Generation and Summarization

• Playing the creator: Generating Text with Markov Chains
• Distilling knowledge: Understanding Text Summarization and Key Input Parameters for TextRank
• Peering into the future: Recent Developments in Text Generation and Summarization
• Solving real-world problems: Addressing Challenges in Extractive Summarization

8. Riding the Wave of Sentiment Analysis

• Unveiling emotions: Introduction to Sentiment Analysis Tools
• Demystifying the Textblob library
• Preparing the canvas: Understanding Data for Sentiment Analysis
• Training your own emotion detectors: Building Sentiment Models

Optional / Bonus Content: Follow On

Optional: Capstone Project

• Apply the skills learned throughout the course.
• Define the problem and gather the data.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis for text data.
• Carry out preprocessing and feature extraction.
• Select and train a model.
• Evaluate the model and interpret the results.
• Lab: Complete a capstone project where students tackle a real-world NLP problem from start to finish. (1 hour)
• Tools Used: Python, Various Python Libraries (based on project needs)

Bonus Chapter: Generative AI and NLP

• Introduction to Generative AI and its role in NLP.
• Overview of Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models.
• Using GPT models for text generation and completion.
• Applying GPT models for improving autocomplete features.
• Use cases of GPT in question answering systems and chatbots.

Bonus Chapter: Advanced Applications of NLP with GPT

• Fine-tuning GPT models for specific NLP tasks.
• Using GPT for sentiment analysis and text classification.
• Role of GPT in Named Entity Recognition (NER).
• Application of GPT in developing advanced chatbots.
• Ethics and limitations of GPT and generative AI technologies.

• Proficiency in Python: As the course involves Python for hands-on labs and examples, attendees should have a good understanding of Python programming, including data structures, control flow, and basic coding practices.
• Basic knowledge of Machine Learning: Understanding the principles of machine learning, including concepts like training and testing splits, model evaluation, and overfitting, will be beneficial.
• Familiarity with Linear Algebra and Statistics: Some fundamental concepts in linear algebra (such as vectors and matrices) and statistics (mean, median, standard deviation, etc.) are essential for understanding the theory behind NLP.
• Experience with any Data Analysis Libraries: Having experience with Python data analysis libraries like Pandas, NumPy, or Matplotlib can be beneficial as they are often used in the preprocessing and analysis of text data.
• General Understanding of Natural Language Processing: While not strictly necessary, having a basic understanding of what NLP is and its potential applications can help attendees contextualize the learnings better.

This in an intermediate and beyond-level course is geared for experienced Python developers looking to delve into the exciting field of Natural Language Processing. It is ideally suited for roles such as data analysts, data scientists, machine learning engineers, or anyone working with text data and seeking to extract valuable insights from it. If you're in a role where you're tasked with analyzing customer sentiment, building chatbots, or dealing with large volumes of text data, this course will provide you with practical, hands-on skills that you can apply right away.