Chapter 1

Introduction to NLP

You are likely using NLP systems every day without even realizing it: search, spam filters, translation, sentiment analysis, and text generation are all NLP. This chapter maps the full landscape of what NLP does, identifies the fundamental challenges that make language so much harder to represent than images, and lays out the historical arc from bag-of-words to large language models that the rest of the unit follows.

• 2. Why Text Is Harder Than It Looks→
• 3. The Roadmap→