Select Topics in Python: Natural Language Processing

Overview

Code and run your first NLP program in minutes without installing anything! This course is designed for learners who have some experience with Python but are a novice to NLP. The modules in this course cover processing and analyzing text; analyzing speech, syntax, and semantics; and building a chatbot. To allow for a truly hands-on, self-paced learning experience, this course is video-free. Assignments contain short explanations with images and runnable code examples with suggested edits to explore code examples further, building a deeper understanding by doing. You’ll benefit from instant feedback from a variety of assessment items along the way, gently progressing from quick understanding checks (multiple choice, fill in the blank, and un-scrambling code blocks) to slowly building features, resulting in large coding projects at the end of the course.

Syllabus

NLP Basic Workflow

Welcome to Week 1 of the Select Topics in Python: Natural Language Processing course. These assignments cover the basics of NLP and the NLTK library, pre-processing, processing, and analyzing text. The module ends with graded coding exercises.

Methods for Analyzing Natural Language

Welcome to Week 2 of the Select Topics in Python: Natural Language Processing course. These assignments cover how to convert natural language into numerical representations that enable you to compute the similarity between provided text, and how to use a pre-trained language model. The module ends with graded coding exercises.

Creating an NLP-Powered Chatbot

Welcome to Week 3 of the Select Topics in Python: Natural Language Processing course. These assignments cover the basics about how chatbots work and will create a series of chatbots - ranging from a simple, hard-coded chatbot in Python to a more sophisticated open domain chatbot that uses a pre-trained language model. The module ends with graded coding exercises.