Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Today, we are faced with a staggering amount of text data coming at us from all directions, from social media platforms to email communications, and from text messages to online reviews. This exponential growth in text data has led to a rapid growth in the development of text-based applications powered by advanced deep learning techniques, used to unlock insights from text data. We find ourselves in the dawn of a transformative era, powered by tech giants such as Google and Microsoft and revolutionary start-ups such as OpenAI and Anthropic. These visionaries are leading the charge in building powerful solutions capable of solving a myriad of text-based challenges, such as summarizing large volumes of documents, extracting sentiments from online platforms, and generating text for blog posts – the list of uses is endless.

Real-world text data can be messy; it could be riddled with unwanted information such as punctuation marks, special...