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When you’re on the verge of wanting to learn something new, a big factor you consider is how much this will cost you. With how the world is and the cost of living, we don’t blame you. It can be hard to want to elevate your career and upskill without looking at costs. 

With that being said, for those of you who are looking into Natural Language Processing (NLP), want to know more about it, or want to steer your career towards that direction - this blog is for you. 

I will go through 5 courses to master NLP - and you won’t need to spend a penny!

Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Level: Beginner

Some of you may be completely new to the data science and NLP world, therefore getting a good foundation in the sector is your #1 priority. 

A course offered by The University of Canterbury in the UK provides a 6-week course in which you will learn the core techniques of computational linguistics as well as the cognitive science that makes it all possible and the ethics we need to use it properly.

It is made up of 3 sections:

• Module 1. Why Use Text Analytics?
• Module 2. Working with Text Data
• Module 3. Text Classification

This course is self-paced and is part one of the Text Analytics with Python professional certificate. If you would like to progress, you always have that option or you can do it as a stand-alone course.

Ready to give it a go?

Link: Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Visualizing Natural Language Processing

Level: Intermediate

A continuation of the above course, the University of Canterbury offers the 2nd part of the intro to NLP with a 6-week course which will extend your knowledge of the core techniques of computational linguistics with the help of different case studies and be able to visualize your outputs. 

Made up of 3 sections, you will dive into:

• Module 1. Text Similarity
• Module 2. Visualizing Text Analytics
• Module 3. Applying Text Analytics to New Fields

Done with part 1 and ready to move on to part 2?

Link: Visualizing Natural Language Processing

Introduction to NLP

Level: Beginner

Can’t commit to 6 weeks and want a quick course that will provide you with the same knowledge? That’s fine - we got you. 

Udemy offers an Introduction to NLP course which will provide you with the foundations of NLP, where you will learn:

1. Why NLP is important
2. Complexity in handling NLP
3. Business use cases of NLP
4. Different types of NLP problems
5. Approach for solving NLP problems
6. Applying machine learning concepts
7. Word embedding

In less time, you will be able to master NLP with this course, as well as open up doors for other opportunities where NLP can take your career if you continue to progress. 

Interested?

Link: Introduction to NLP

Natural Language Processing in TensorFlow

Level: Intermediate

A course provided by DeepLearning.AI, an education technology company which aims to empower people to build an AI-powered future through world-class education. The course is intermediate level, and will roughly take you 24 hours to complete - in your own time!

You will learn about NLP in TensorFlow, a very popular framework, as well as process text, including tokenization, and apply RNNs, GRUs, and LSTMs in TensorFlow.

The course is broken up into 4 modules:

• Sentiment in Text
• Word Embeddings
• Sequence Models
• Sequence Models and Literature

This course is part of the DeepLearning.AI TensorFlow Developer Professional Certificate, therefore if you want to progress - you have that choice.

Sounds good. right?

Link: Natural Language Processing in TensorFlow

Natural Language Processing (NLP) with BERT

Level: Intermediate

If you are new to the world of NLP, you may or may not have heard of Google's NLP algorithm BERT. If you’re looking into NLP, you should definitely want to know about it. 

This FREE course is offered by Udemy and is a 3 part one-hour course where you will dive into:

• Part 1: Data Preprocessing
• Part 2: Building the BERT model
• Part 3: Training and evaluating the BERT model

You will learn how to perform semantic analysis on movie reviews using data from IMDB and a low-code Python library, Ktrain. You will learn all of this in Google Colab!

Have an hour to spare?

Link: Natural Language Processing (NLP) with BERT

Wrapping it up

When you’re starting something new, it’s always good to test the waters first. Taking on free courses will allow you to gauge what the sector is like and if it is something you would like to progress in. 

I hope this blog has helped you with exactly that!
 
 

Nisha Arya is a data scientist, freelance technical writer, and an editor and community manager for KDnuggets. She is particularly interested in providing data science career advice or tutorials and theory-based knowledge around data science. Nisha covers a wide range of topics and wishes to explore the different ways artificial intelligence can benefit the longevity of human life. A keen learner, Nisha seeks to broaden her tech knowledge and writing skills, while helping guide others.