Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lesson Plan (Weeks 1–5)
Week 1: Introduction to NLP and Applications
Lesson Content
Definition of Natural Language Processing (NLP):
NLP is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables computers to interpret and
process human language.
Real-World Applications of NLP:
- Virtual assistants (Siri, Alexa)
- Sentiment analysis for social media
- Machine translation (Google Translate)
- Automatic speech recognition (ASR)
Sample Program: Tokenization
import nltk
from nltk.tokenize import word_tokenize
# Download the required Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) resources
nltk.download('punkt')
# Sample text
text = "Natural Language Processing is a fascinating field of Artificial
Intelligence!"
# Tokenize the text into words
tokens = word_tokenize(text)
print("Tokens:", tokens)
Detailed Explanation:
- Import the nltk library, which stands for Natural Language Toolkit.
- Download the 'punkt' tokenizer package using nltk.download('punkt').
- Define a sample text variable called text.
- Use the word_tokenize() function to break the text into individual words.
- Print the list of tokens.
Week 2: N-gram Language Models and Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging
Lesson Content
What are N-grams?
N-grams are contiguous sequences of N words from a given text.
Part-of-Speech (POS) Tagging: Assigning grammatical roles to words in a sentence.
Sample Program: Bigrams and POS Tagging
from nltk import ngrams
# Sample text
text = "I love natural language processing."
# Generate bigrams
bigram_model = list(ngrams(text.split(), 2))
print("Bigrams:", bigram_model)
import nltk
nltk.download('averaged_perceptron_tagger')
# Sample sentence
sentence = "I am learning NLP."
# Tokenize and assign POS tags
tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(sentence)
tags = nltk.pos_tag(tokens)
print("POS Tags:", tags)
Week 3: Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Sequence Labeling
Lesson Content
Hidden Markov Model (HMM): A probabilistic model used for sequence predictions.
Sequence Labeling: Assigning labels to sequences of input data.
Sample Program: HMM for POS Tagging
import nltk
from nltk.tag import hmm
# Training data: a list of (word, POS) pairs
train_data = [[('The', 'DT'), ('dog', 'NN'), ('barked', 'VBD')]]
trainer = hmm.HiddenMarkovModelTrainer()
hmm_model = trainer.train(train_data)
# Test sentence
test_sentence = ['The', 'cat', 'meowed']
tags = hmm_model.tag(test_sentence)
print("Tagged Sentence:", tags)
Week 4: Syntactic and Semantic Analysis
Lesson Content
Syntactic Analysis: Analyzing sentence structure based on grammar rules.
Semantic Analysis: Extracting the meaning of words in a sentence.
Sample Program: Syntax Parsing
import nltk
from nltk import CFG
# Define grammar using a Context-Free Grammar (CFG)
grammar = CFG.fromstring("""
S -> NP VP
NP -> DT NN
VP -> VBZ NP
DT -> 'The'
NN -> 'dog' | 'cat'
VBZ -> 'chases'
""")
# Parse the sentence
parser = nltk.ChartParser(grammar)
sentence = ['The', 'dog', 'chases', 'The', 'cat']
for tree in parser.parse(sentence):
print(tree)
Week 5: Continuous Assessment Test (CAT) 1 Preparation
Review concepts from weeks 1–4:
- Tokenization
- N-grams and POS Tagging
- Hidden Markov Models (HMMs)
- Syntax and Semantic Analysis
Task: Develop a complete NLP pipeline that tokenizes a paragraph, tags each word with a
POS tag, and parses the sentence using custom grammar.
