This course is intended to give learners and introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and give them the skills they need to enter a Kaggle competition focusing on NLP. The learners will be introduced to the Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK), Spacy, and the sklearn machine learning library. The course is broken down into three sections, being an introduction to NLP, practice projects, and lastly the chance to enter a Kaggle competition.

Natural language processing, or NLP, is a subfield of linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, with particular emphasis on how to program computers to process and analyse large amounts of natural language data. One crucial point about NLP is the fact that the text is bundled up in objects that must be converted to numeric representation before the CPU can do anything with it. In fact, the decimal numbers we see on the computer screen must also be converted to a base two number system comprised of ones and zeros before the computer can use it because the device is designed to utilise binary logic at the heart of its processing unit. NLP has many applications that help us in our modern lives. Sentiment analysis is able to recognise subtle nuances in emotion and opinion, and determine whether they are positive or negative.