Natural Language Processing Nanodegree Program: What You’ll Learn
Specialize in this incredible field, and save on your tuition when you enroll by April 10th!
Natural Language Processing (NLP) represents one of the great technological breakthroughs in all of human history. For the first time, computers are developing the ability to understand human language as we speak it, and the implications are staggering.
Information
As a democratizing influence, it’s almost impossible to conceive of the potential impact Natural Language Processing can have. Think of all the valuable information there is housed on the world’s computers, and then consider how difficult it has historically been for most people to access that information. Using NLP, accurate and meaningful information extraction becomes as simple as asking a question.
Translation
As a unifying force, Natural Language Processing has the ability to connect people and cultures in remarkable ways, because it can be used to solve formidable translation challenges. Imagine representatives from different countries hammering out global initiatives at the political table, able to rely on Natural Language Processing to ensure accurately translated communication in real time!
Knowledge
Natural Language Processing is an amazingly flexible and effective tool for knowledge capture of all kinds. Imagine a world where doctors can dictate real-time patient analyses directly into a system, and have those details automatically stored for future retrieval. Consider the biologist in the field, who is able to describe observed phenomena for digital posterity with full accuracy. Consider the business that is able to capture every customer conversation, analyze them for relevant value, and archive them for future product-related reference.
Shaping The Future
Natural Language Processing is a true revolution. It is admittedly early days, but as computers get faster and better, and as our understanding of machine learning algorithms gets stronger, there is no limit to where we can take this technology!
As a specialist in the field of Natural Language Processing, you will help shape the future, and define our relationship not just to technology, but to one another.
Career Opportunities
From a career standpoint, you couldn’t pick a better time to start mastering NLP skills. According to a recent report by Tractica, the Natural Language Processing market will reach $22.3 billion by 2025. The opportunities in this field are simply incredible. That’s why we created the Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program. So that you have the skills and experience to enter this field, and take advantage of all this opportunity.
Choosing the Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program
If you’re new to Natural Language Processing, but you have a working knowledge of machine learning, deep learning, and Python, the Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program is ideal for you. You’ll learn all the skills and techniques necessary to obtain a solid background in Natural Language Processing, and you’ll become an expert in its main components, including speech recognition, sentiment analysis, and machine translation. You’ll learn to code probabilistic and deep learning models, train them on real data, and build a career-ready portfolio as an NLP expert.
Throughout the program, you’ll be working with curriculum built in collaboration with IBM Watson and Amazon Alexa!
What You’ll Learn
The Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program is comprised of 3 sections.
1. Introduction to Natural Language Processing
This is where you learn the basics of Natural Language Processing. You’ll discover ways to process text, including lemmatization and stemming, alongside several other techniques. You will also learn probabilistic methods such as hidden Markov models, and will be able to apply them to process language.
At the end of the lesson, you’ll have a project to complete, in which you’ll put all your newfound knowledge into practice, by building a model that tags words in a sentence with their corresponding parts of speech. You will start with a simple lookup table, and progressively add more complexity to improve the model using probabilistic graphical models. Ultimately you’ll be using a Python package to build and train a tagger with a hidden Markov model, and you will be able to compare the performances of all these models in a dataset of sentences.
2. Computing with Natural Language Processing
Here, you’ll learn some of the most exciting models used in Natural Language Processing. You’ll cover everything from feature extraction and embeddings, to topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and deep learning attention mechanisms.
For your project, you’ll build a deep neural network that functions as part of an end-to-end machine translation pipeline, using recurrent neural network architectures. Your completed pipeline will accept English text as input and return the French translation. First you will preprocess the data by converting text to sequence of integers. Then you will build several deep learning models for translating the text into French. As a final step, you will run this models on English test to analyze their performance.
3. Communicating with Natural Language Processing
In the final section, you’ll get an overview of Voice User Interfaces (VUI), focus on conversational AI, and learn how Alexa operates. Then you’ll dive deeper into the exciting field of Speech Recognition, learning Signal Analysis and Phonetics, single word classification using Dynamic Time Warping, and sentence recognition using Hidden markov Models. You’ll explore the cutting edge of Automatic Speech Recognition, leveraging deep neural networks, and you’ll also have the chance to build an Alexa skill in a lab.
Finally, in the concluding project, you’ll have the chance to build a deep neural network that functions as part of an end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) pipeline. Your completed pipeline will accept raw audio as input and return a predicted transcription of the spoken language. You’ll begin by investigating a dataset, that will be used to train and evaluate your models. Your algorithm will first convert any raw audio to feature representations that are commonly used for ASR. You will then build neural networks that map these features to transcribed text.
The Support You’ll Receive
Udacity offers you a wide array of support options to ensure you proceed through the program successfully. You’ll have access to an AI expert through our Classroom Mentorship program, and you’ll get detailed feedback on your project submission by one of our expert project reviewers. You’ll also join a Slack community where you can engage with our Community Manager, your fellow students, and even your instructors.
How to Enroll
We are now accepting new students to the Natural Language Processing Nanodegree program.
The program is comprised of a single 3-month term. Enroll by April 10, 2018, so you’ll be able to enjoy big savings on your tuition!
To learn more, you can also explore a Free Preview of our program (but don’t delay on enrollment, and miss your chance to save!). You’ll meet your instructors, and explore the lessons.
The Opportunity to Specialize
Through our School of Artificial Intelligence, the world of AI is open to everyone, and the opportunity to specialize in the incredible field of Natural Language Processing is yours when you enroll in this unique program. Come learn Natural Language Processing, and start building your future career today!
