Data Science: Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python

Data Science: Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python

In this course you will build MULTIPLE practical systems using natural language processing, or NLP – the branch of machine learning and data science that deals with text and speech. This course is not part of my deep learning series, so it doesn’t contain any hard math – just straight up coding in Python. All the materials for this course are FREE.

After a brief discussion about what NLP is and what it can do, we will begin building very useful stuff. The first thing we’ll build is a cipher decryption algorithm. These have applications in warfare and espionage. We will learn how to build and apply several useful NLP tools in this section, namely, character-level language models (using the Markov principle), and genetic algorithms.

The second project, where we begin to use more traditional “machine learning“, is to build a spam detector. You likely get very little spam these days, compared to say, the early 2000s, because of systems like these.

Next we’ll build a model for sentiment analysis in Python. This is something that allows us to assign a score to a block of text that tells us how positive or negative it is. People have used sentiment analysis on Twitter to predict the stock market.

We’ll go over some practical tools and techniques like the NLTK (natural language toolkit) library and latent semantic analysis or LSA.

Finally, we end the course by building an article spinner. This is a very hard problem and even the most popular products out there these days don’t get it right. These lectures are designed to just get you started and to give you ideas for how you might improve on them yourself. Once mastered, you can use it as an SEO, or search engine optimization tool. Internet marketers everywhere will love you if you can do this for them!

This course focuses on “how to build and understand“, not just “how to use”. Anyone can learn to use an API in 15 minutes after reading some documentation. It’s not about “remembering facts”, it’s about “seeing for yourself” via experimentation. It will teach you how to visualize what’s happening in the model internally. If you want more than just a superficial look at machine learning models, this course is for you.

Suggested Prerequisites:

• Python coding: if/else, loops, lists, dicts, sets
• Take my free Numpy prerequisites course (it’s FREE, no excuses!) to learn about Numpy, Matplotlib, Pandas, and Scikit-Learn, as well as Machine Learning basics
• Optional: If you want to understand the math parts, linear algebra and probability are helpful

TIPS (for getting through the course):

• Watch it at 2x.
• Take handwritten notes. This will drastically increase your ability to retain the information.
• Ask lots of questions on the discussion board. The more the better!
• Realize that most exercises will take you days or weeks to complete.
• Write code yourself, don’t just sit there and look at my code.

WHAT ORDER SHOULD I TAKE YOUR COURSES IN?:

• Check out the lecture “What order should I take your courses in?” (available in the Appendix of any of my courses, including the free Numpy course)

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