front matter
Having worked at the intersection of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and education for the last two decades, I have always been passionate about education and helping people learn new technologies. That’s why I didn’t think twice when I heard about the opportunity of publishing a book on NLP.
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) went through a lot of changes over the past several years, including the explosive popularization of neural network-based methods and the advent of large, pretrained language models. This change made advanced language technologies possible, many of which you interact with daily—voice-based virtual assistants, speech recognition, and machine translation, to name a few. However, the “technology stack” of NLP, characterized by the use of pretrained models and transfer learning, has finally stabilized in the last few years and is expected to remain so, at least for the next couple of years. This is why I think now is a good time to start learning about NLP.