5/28/25, 8:33 PM natural language processing
natural language processing
Introduction to Natural Langu
age Processing
Evolution of Natural Language
Natural language is the primary mode of communication for human
s
It has evolved over thousands of years, with the development of vari
ous languages, dialects, and writing systems
The study of how natural language has developed and changed ov
er time is known as the evolution of natural language
Introduction to Natural Language Pr
ocessing (NLP)
NLP is a field of artificial intelligence that focuses on the interaction b
etween computers and human (natural) language
It involves the development of algorithms and models that can und
erstand, interpret, and generate human language
NLP is a multidisciplinary field, drawing on linguistics, computer scien
ce, and cognitive science
Need for NLP
Vast amounts of unstructured data in the form of text, speech, and o
ther natural language formats
Desire to automate tasks that involve understanding and processin
g human language
Potential to improve human-computer interaction and enable more
natural and intuitive interfaces
Applications of NLP
Discourse and Dialog Analysis: Understanding the structure and me
aning of conversations, including turn-taking, topic shifts, and prag
matic implications
Opinion Mining: Extracting and analyzing opinions, sentiments, and
emotions from text data
Machine Translation: Translating text from one natural language to
another
Text Summarization: Generating concise summaries of longer text
documents
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Question Answering: Developing systems that can understand and
respond to natural language questions
Conversational AI: Building intelligent virtual assistants that can eng
age in natural language dialog
Phases of NLP
1. Data Preprocessing:
Tokenization: Breaking text into smaller units, such as words or sen
tences
Embedding: Representing words or text as numerical vectors
Stemming: Reducing words to their base or root form
Lemmatization: Grouping together the different inflected forms of
a word
Normalization: Standardizing text by converting to lowercase, rem
oving punctuation, etc.
Named Entity Recognition: Identifying and classifying named entit
ies (e.g., people, organizations, locations) in text
2. Feature Extraction:
One-hot Encoding: Representing categorical variables as binary v
ectors
Bag-of-Words (BoW): Representing text as a vector of word count
s
Skip-grams: Capturing the context of words by considering seque
nces of words
CountVectorizer: Transforming text into a matrix of token counts
TF-IDF: Weighting word frequencies by their inverse document freq
uency
3. Probabilistic Modeling:
Naive Bayes: A simple probabilistic classifier based on Bayes' theo
rem
Markov Models: Statistical models that capture the probability of a
sequence of events
N-grams: Modeling the probability of a word given the previous $n
-1$ words
Smoothing: Techniques to handle unseen words and improve prob
ability estimates
4. Generative Models:
Probabilistic Language Modeling: Modeling the probability distribu
tion of natural language
Neural Networks: Powerful machine learning models that can lear
n complex patterns in data
Introduction to Feature Extraction
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One-hot Encoding
Represents categorical variables as binary vectors
Each category is assigned a unique index, and a vector of zeros is cr
eated with a single 1 in the position corresponding to the category
Bag-of-Words (BoW)
Represents text as a vector of word counts
The vocabulary is the set of unique words in the corpus
The vector length is equal to the size of the vocabulary, and each ele
ment represents the count of the corresponding word
Skip-grams
Captures the context of words by considering sequences of words
Instead of just looking at adjacent words, skip-grams consider word
s that are $k$ positions apart
This allows the model to learn about the relationships between word
s and their context
CountVectorizer
Transforms text into a matrix of token counts
Each row represents a document, and each column represents a uni
que token (word)
The value at each position is the count of the corresponding token in
the document
TF-IDF
Weighting word frequencies by their inverse document frequency
Term Frequency (TF): The number of times a word appears in a docu
ment
Inverse Document Frequency (IDF): The inverse of the number of doc
uments containing the word
TF-IDF = TF * IDF, which gives higher weights to words that are more i
nformative and less common
Probabilistic Language Modeling
Naive Bayes
A simple probabilistic classifier based on Bayes' theorem
Assumes that the features (words) are independent given the class
(e.g., sentiment, topic)
Widely used for text classification tasks, such as spam detection an
d sentiment analysis
Markov Models
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Statistical models that capture the probability of a sequence of eve
nts
The probability of the next event depends only on the current state,
not the entire history
N-grams are a type of Markov model that consider the previous $n-1
$ words to predict the next word
N-grams and Smoothing
N-grams model the probability of a word given the previous $n-1$ w
ords
Smoothing techniques are used to handle unseen words and impro
ve probability estimates
Examples of smoothing methods include Laplace smoothing, Katz b
ackoff, and Kneser-Ney smoothing
Generative Models of Language
Probabilistic models that can generate new text that resembles the t
raining data
Examples include n-gram models, hidden Markov models, and neur
al language models
These models learn the underlying probability distribution of natural
language and can be used for tasks like language modeling, machi
ne translation, and text generation
Introduction to Word Embeddings
Word Embeddings and Word Vectors
Word embeddings are numerical representations of words that capt
ure semantic and syntactic relationships
Word2Vec and GloVe are popular word embedding models that lear
n these representations from text data
Word Window Classification
The task of predicting a word given its context (surrounding words)
This is the basis for many word embedding models, which learn wor
d representations that are useful for this task
Neural Networks and Matrix Calculus
Word embedding models are often trained using neural networks
The backpropagation algorithm is used to update the model param
eters and learn the word representations
Matrix calculus is an important tool for understanding and impleme
nting these neural network models
Linguistic Structure: Dependency Parsing
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Dependency parsing is the task of identifying the grammatical relati
onships between words in a sentence
This can be useful for understanding the structure and meaning of n
atural language
Negative Sampling
A technique used to train word embedding models more efficiently
Instead of considering all possible words as negative examples, neg
ative sampling selects a small subset of negative examples to upda
te the model
Recurrent Neural Networks
Recurrent Neural Networks and Language Mo
dels
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a type of neural network that
can process sequential data, such as text
RNNs are commonly used for language modeling, where the goal is t
o predict the next word in a sequence
Vanishing Gradients
The vanishing gradient problem is a challenge that can occur when
training RNNs on long sequences
As the sequence length increases, the gradients used to update the
model parameters can become very small, making it difficult to lear
n long-term dependencies
Variants of RNNs: LSTM and GRU
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) ar
e variants of RNNs that address the vanishing gradient problem
These models use gating mechanisms to selectively remember and
forget information, allowing them to better capture long-term depe
ndencies in sequential data
Machine Translation and the Paradi
gm Shift in NLP
Machine Translation (Seq2Seq)
Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models are used for machine tr
anslation, where the input is a sequence of words in one language, a
nd the output is the translation in another language
These models typically use an encoder-decoder architecture, where
the encoder processes the input sequence and the decoder generat
es the output sequence
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Paradigm Shift in NLP: BERT, LaMbDa, GPT
The field of NLP has undergone a significant paradigm shift in recent
years, with the development of large, pre-trained language models l
ike BERT, LaMbDa, and GPT
These models are trained on vast amounts of text data and can be f
ine-tuned for a wide range of NLP tasks, often outperforming previou
s state-of-the-art approaches
NLP in AI: Conversational
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