Roadmap for Mastering Natural Language Processing (NLP)
1. Foundation Building
1. Programming Skills
o Master Python, focusing on libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib.
o Practice implementing small NLP tasks like tokenization and basic text processing.
2. Mathematics for NLP
o Linear Algebra: Understand vectors, matrices, eigenvalues.
o Probability and Statistics: Bayes' theorem, distributions, statistical inference.
o Calculus: Basics of gradients and optimization.
3. Introduction to NLP Concepts
o Study tokenization, stemming, lemmatization, stopword removal.
o Learn Bag of Words (BoW) and Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF).
2. Core NLP Techniques
1. Classical NLP Approaches
o n-grams, Language Models, and Markov Chains.
o Parsing (Dependency and Constituency).
o Named Entity Recognition (NER), Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging.
2. Machine Learning for NLP
o Supervised Learning: Logistic Regression, SVMs for text classification.
o Unsupervised Learning: Clustering and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).
o Topic Modeling: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA).
3. Hands-On Projects
o Sentiment analysis on movie reviews or tweets.
o Text classification using traditional ML techniques.
Suggested Tools
Libraries: scikit-learn, NLTK, spaCy.
3. Deep Learning for NLP
1. Word Representations
o Word embeddings: Word2Vec, GloVe, fastText.
o Contextual embeddings: ELMo.
2. Sequence Models
o Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs): Vanilla, LSTMs, GRUs.
o Attention Mechanisms and Sequence-to-Sequence Models.
3. Transformer Models
o Deep dive into the Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al.).
o Pretrained models: BERT, GPT, T5.
4. Hands-On Projects
o Machine translation using seq2seq models.
o Text summarization with Transformer-based architectures.
4. Advanced NLP and Applications
1. Advanced NLP Topics
o Transfer learning in NLP.
o Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) like GPT, LLaMA.
o Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF).
2. NLP for Specialized Domains
o Biomedical NLP (BioBERT).
o Legal NLP (LexGLUE, Legal-BERT).
3. Applications
o Question answering and conversational agents.
o Building recommendation systems using NLP.
o Document summarization and sentiment analysis for enterprises.
4. Hands-On Projects
o Build a chatbot using BERT or GPT.
o Create a Q&A system for domain-specific datasets.
o Develop a custom LLM-based fine-tuned application.
5. Research and Real-World Application
1. Research Contribution
o Read recent NLP papers on ArXiv (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL proceedings).
o Implement and improve upon published methods.
2. Real-World Deployments
o Use cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) to deploy NLP models.
o Work with vector databases for semantic search.
3. Participation in Competitions
o Compete on Kaggle NLP challenges or Hugging Face open leaderboards.
o Collaborate on open-source projects in NLP.
4. Hands-On Projects
o Build a scalable legal or medical research assistant.
o Real-time sentiment analysis system for social media.
6. Tools and Technologies to Master Along the Way
Key Libraries: transformers, TensorFlow, PyTorch, spaCy, Hugging Face.
Deployment: Docker, Flask, FastAPI.
Visualization: Matplotlib, Seaborn, TensorBoard.
NLP Frameworks: AllenNLP, StanfordNLP.
7. Evaluation Metrics
BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR (translation/summarization).
F1 score, precision, recall (classification tasks).
Perplexity, word error rate (language models).
