The field of natural language processing (NLP) aims at getting computers to perform useful and interesting tasks with human language. This course introduces students to the 3 pillars underlying modern NLP: probabilistic language models, simple neural networks with a focus on gradient based learning, and vector-based meaning representations in the form of word embeddings. At the end of the course, students will be able to implement and analyze probabilistic language models based on N-grams, text classifiers using logistic regression and gradient-based learning, and vector-based approaches to word meaning and text classification.



Fundamentals of Natural Language Processing

Instructor: James Martin
Access provided by Coursera Learning Team
Recommended experience
What you'll learn
Analyze corpora to develop effective lexicons using subword tokenization.
Develop language models that can assign probabilities to texts.
Design, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of text classifiers using gradient-based learning techniques.
Design, implement and evaluate unsupervised methods for learning word embeddings.
Skills you'll gain
Details to know

Add to your LinkedIn profile
4 assignments
March 2025
See how employees at top companies are mastering in-demand skills


Earn a career certificate
Add this credential to your LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV
Share it on social media and in your performance review

There are 4 modules in this course
This first week of Fundamentals of Natural Language Processing introduces the fundamental concepts of natural language processing (NLP), focusing on how computers process and analyze human language. You will explore key linguistic structures, including words and morphology, and learn essential techniques for text normalization and tokenization.
What's included
5 videos5 readings1 assignment
This week explores foundational language modeling techniques, focusing on n-gram models and their role in statistical Natural Language Processing. You will learn how n-gram language models are constructed, smoothed, and evaluated for effectiveness.
What's included
4 videos4 readings1 assignment1 programming assignment
This week introduces text classification and explores logistic regression as a powerful classification technique. You will learn how logistic regression models work, including key mathematical concepts such as the logit function, gradients, and stochastic gradient descent. The week also covers evaluation metrics for assessing classifier performance.
What's included
6 videos3 readings1 assignment1 programming assignment
This final week explores how words can be represented as vectors in a high-dimensional space, allowing computational models to capture semantic relationships between words. You will learn about both sparse and dense vector representations, including TF-IDF, Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), and Word2Vec. The module also covers techniques for evaluating and applying word embeddings.
What's included
7 videos4 readings1 assignment1 programming assignment
Instructor

Offered by
Why people choose Coursera for their career




Recommended if you're interested in Computer Science
University of Colorado Boulder
DeepLearning.AI
Edureka
DeepLearning.AI

Open new doors with Coursera Plus
Unlimited access to 10,000+ world-class courses, hands-on projects, and job-ready certificate programs - all included in your subscription
Advance your career with an online degree
Earn a degree from world-class universities - 100% online
Join over 3,400 global companies that choose Coursera for Business
Upskill your employees to excel in the digital economy