Natural Language Processing Specialization is a comprehensive, hands-on concentration by Deep Learning AI, offered by Coursera. If you have been started working with NLP, and would like to understand the fundamentals and go beyond using libraries (CoreNLP, NLTK, etc), these four courses will provide you a good foundation to help build real-world solutions. Even if you are a seasoned NLP developer, I found refreshing the fundamentals is always helpful.
The specialization consists of four courses. Natural Language Processing with Classification and Vector Spaces, Natural Language Processing with Probabilistic Models, Natural Language Processing with Sequence Models and Natural Language Processing with Attention Models.
I personally enjoyed the attention network part of the specialization, which is covered in the fourth course, natural language processing with attention models. The overall certification is focused on getting you to understand the fundamentals such as logistic regression, naïve Bayes, and word vectors to implement sentiment analysis, and move on the more advance topics such as dynamic programming, hidden Markov models, and word embeddings. The exercises and assignments are practical i.e. machine translation, implementing autocorrect, summarization, chatbots, autocomplete, identifying entities, and machine comprehension. You will learn to use recurrent neural networks, LSTMs, GRUs & Siamese networks, encoder-decoder, causal, & self-attention techniques. And yes, BERT and HuggingFace has a special place in this specialization!
The learning curve for Trax, an end-to-end library for deep learning by Google Brain team, wasn't really steep but this is one of my personal pet-peeves, probably steps from the disdain of Knuth's hypothetical MIX computer. Regardless, this is an excellent hands-on specialization for NLP related topics, especially the contemporary transformer architecture and attention models. Highly recommended if you are interested in modern NLP.
Also, if you are interested in more detailed classroom setting course, CS224n: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning with playlists on youtube might be of interest.
Happy Coding!
