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Module 01 Β· Foundations Β· ~3hr total

Text Processing

Models don't read text. They read numbers. This chapter is about the first, unglamorous, and surprisingly consequential step of every NLP system: turning language into something a model can compute with.

Learning objectives

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

  • Explain why raw text must be broken into tokens before a model can use it.
  • Measure a tokenizer with three metrics, vocabulary size, token fertility, and compression ratio, and say what each one costs you.
  • Walk through the Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) and Unigram algorithms by hand.
  • Compute TF-IDF to score how important a word is to a document.
  • Use n-grams to capture word order that single words throw away.

  1. 1From text to numbers4 min
  2. 2Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE)4 min
  3. 3TF-IDF, how important is a word to a document?4 min
  4. 4Hands-on lab2 min
  5. ?Module quizFree account required

Keep going

15 more modules, 57 lessons, and every lab notebook

Retrieval and RAG, agents and MCP, fine-tuning, alignment, evaluation, and production observability β€” plus the quizzes and progress tracking.

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