THE PHILOSOPHY 

We want to provide a holistic, yet, practical perspective which enables the reader to successfully build real world NLP solutions embedded in larger product setups. Thus, most chapters are accompanied by code walkthroughs in the associated git repository. The book is also supplemented with extensive references at the end of each chapter for the readers who want to delve deeper. Throughout the book, we start with a simple solution and incrementally build more complex solutions, by taking a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach, as commonly found in industry practice. We also give tips wherever possible based on our experience and learnings. Where possible, each chapter is accompanied by a discussion on the state of the art in that topic. Most chapters conclude with a case study taking real world use cases.

Consider the task of building a chatbot or text classification system at your organization. In the beginning there may be little or no data to work with. At this point a basic solution using rule based systems or traditional machine learning will be apt. As you accumulate more data, more sophisticated NLP techniques (which are often data intensive) can be used including deep learning. At each step of this journey there are dozens of alternative approaches one can take. This book will help you navigate this maze of options.

Sowmya Vajjala has a PhD in Computational Linguistics from University of Tubingen, Germany. She currently works as a research officer at National Research Council, Canada’s largest federal research and development organization. Her past work experience spans both academia as a faculty at Iowa State University, USA as well as industry at Microsoft Research and The Globe and Mail.

Bodhisattwa Majumder is a doctoral candidate in NLP and ML at UC San Diego. Earlier he studied at IIT Kharagpur where he graduated summa cum laude. Previously, he built large-scale NLP systems at Google AI Research and Microsoft Research, which went into products serving millions of users. Currently, he is also leading his university team in the Amazon Alexa Prize for 2019-2020.

Anuj Gupta has built NLP and ML systems at Fortune 100 companies as well as startups as a senior leader. He has incubated and led multiple ML teams in his career. He studied computer science at IIT Delhi and IIIT Hyderabad. He is currently Head of Machine Learning and Data Science at Vahan Inc. Above all, he is a father and husband.

Harshit Surana is founder at DeepFlux Inc. He has built and scaled ML systems at several Silicon Valley startups as a founder and an advisor. He studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon University where he worked with the MIT Media Lab on common sense AI. His research in NLP has received over 200 citations.