From Chatbots to GPT-4: Your NLP Journey from Babble to Brilliance!

Welcome to the wonderful world of Natural Language Processing (NLP) — where machines learn to understand human language, and we inch closer to chatting with robots like they’re our best friends. Whether it’s your phone’s autocorrect, voice assistants, or today’s jaw-dropping GPT-4, NLP is transforming how we interact with technology. Ready to take your first steps in learning NLP, right up to the state-of-the-art models like GPT-4? Let’s go!

1. Baby Steps: Understanding the Basics of NLP

Before we dive into building models that could pass as Shakespeare’s writing buddy, let’s start with the basics of NLP — turning human language into something a machine can work with.

• Key Concepts: Tokens, stopwords, stemming, and lemmatization.
• Tokens: Imagine you’re teaching a toddler to speak. You’d break down sentences into tiny words — well, in NLP, we call those tokens. Machines need sentences broken into tokens to start processing language.
• Stopwords: These are the “meh” words in a sentence like “the,” “is,” or “and” that don’t carry much meaning. We filter them out because why waste energy on fluff?
• Stemming and Lemmatization: These are like trimming the fat from words. “Running,” “ran,” “runs” all essentially mean “run” — we need to simplify words to their root forms so the machine can make sense of them.