Ask HN: How to learn natural language processing?

2 points by jumpman500 3 years ago | 1 comment

Hey HN,

Looking for recommendations on books, courses or projects to learn natural language processing. I have a background in statistics so I understand things like probability, linear/logistic regression, and k-means clustering, but not much about NLP. Ideally would like to slowly work my way towards understanding text-generation and how models like GPT-3 were built.

Thanks!

he11ow 3 years ago |

In late 2017 I got enough of a feel that NLP was moving fast to figure I had better get acquainted with it. I had a technical background, but nothing in NLP. About two years later, I wrote an article with a practical roadmap to learning NLP [1].

A few months later I write a no-maths explainer to transformer models (BERT and GPT-2.) [2] GPT-3 is basically the same but bigger. ChatGPT is a little different).

Recently, I wondered what, if anything, I'd change about these, given where we are with NLP today. The only thing I'd say is getting acquainted with the HuggingFace ecosystem.

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/learn-nlp-the-practical-way-b...

[2] https://towardsdatascience.com/the-abba-explainer-to-bert-an...