Introduction to Natural Language Processing in R

Overview

Gain an overview of all the skills and tools needed to excel in Natural Language Processing in R.

As with any fundamentals course, Introduction to Natural Language Processing in R is designed to equip you with the necessary tools to begin your adventures in analyzing text. Natural language processing (NLP) is a constantly growing field in data science, with some very exciting advancements over the last decade. This course will cover the basics of these topics and prepare you for expanding your analysis capabilities. We dive into regular expressions, topic modeling, named entity recognition, and others, all while providing thorough examples that can be used to kick start your future analysis.

Syllabus

True Fundamentals

Chapter 1 of Introduction to Natural Langauge Processing prepares you for running your first analysis on text. You will explore regular expressions and tokenization, two of the most common components of most analysis tasks. With regular expressions, you can search for any pattern you can think of, and with tokenization, you can prepare and clean text for more sophisticated analysis. This chapter is necessary for tackling the techniques we will learn in the remaining chapters of this course.

Representations of Text

In this chapter, you will learn the most common and studied ways to analyze text. You will look at creating a text corpus, expanding a bag-of-words representation into a TFIDF matrix, and use cosine-similarity metrics to determine how similar two pieces of text are to each other. You build on your foundations for practicing NLP before you dive into applications of NLP in chapters 3 and 4.

Applications: Classification and Topic Modeling

Chapter 3 focuses on two common text analysis approaches, classification modeling, and topic modeling. If you are working on text analysis projects, you will inevitably use one or both of these methods. This chapter teaches you how to perform both techniques and provides insight into how to approach these techniques from a practical point of you.

Advanced Techniques

In chapter 4 we cover two staples of natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and word embeddings. These are two analysis techniques that are a must for anyone learning the fundamentals of text analysis. Furthermore, you will briefly learn about BERT, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition. Almost 15 different analysis techniques were covered in this course, so chapter 4 ends by recapping all of the great techniques you will learn about in this course.