# I want advice on starting out in the NLP field **URL:** \ **Category:** AI Discussions\ **Tags:** natural-language-pro, careers\ **Created:** [June 12, 2024, 12:42am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648 "2024-06-12T00:42:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Ahmezz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Ahmezz](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/Ahmezz)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2024, 12:42am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/1 "2024-06-12T00:42:14Z")
I want to buy a couple of specialization courses on Coursera to be able to work in the field of NLP and in particular speech to text and chatbots. My skills are Python and I have knowledge in using numpy as well as intermediate knowledge when it comes to using NLTK and Sklearn for text preprocessing and tokenization and so on. I’ve taken the Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification by DeepAI on coursera and I feel like i need to understand more about machine learning before I hope straight to an NLP course so any recommendations for building a foundation? Should i rather take the deep learning specialization or should I continue the rest of the courses in the machine leaning specialization first? and which NLP courses would you recommend on coursera that are good enough for working immediately? ---
**Author:** ![TMosh](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/dlai/user_avatar/community.deeplearning.ai/tmosh/32/9321_2.png) [@TMosh](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/TMosh)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2024, 1:16am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/2 "2024-06-12T01:16:03Z")
Recommendation: Deep Learning _Specialization_ (all five courses), then the NLP specialization. ---
**Author:** ![Ahmezz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Ahmezz](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/Ahmezz)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2024, 2:22am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/3 "2024-06-12T02:22:32Z")
which five? I assume you’re talking about the deep learning specialization. ---
**Author:** ![TMosh](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/dlai/user_avatar/community.deeplearning.ai/tmosh/32/9321_2.png) [@TMosh](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/TMosh)\ **Post date:** [June 12, 2024, 2:40am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/4 "2024-06-12T02:40:11Z")
Sorry, I meant to type “Deep Learning Specialization”. _I edited my reply to add that._ ---
**Author:** ![Kruga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ec9cab/32.png) [@Kruga](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/Kruga)\ **Post date:** [June 14, 2024, 5:23pm UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/5 "2024-06-14T17:23:28Z")
Thanks I actually needed this too ---
**Author:** ![fabricio](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/dlai/user_avatar/community.deeplearning.ai/fabricio/32/13892_2.png) [@fabricio](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/fabricio)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2024, 3:28pm UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/7 "2024-06-19T15:28:13Z")
Hi Ahmezz, I am in the same place as you. I’m wondering how to deepen my focus on NLP, which is a domain I enjoy. @TMosh, do you think the NLP specialization is worth doing? ---
**Author:** ![TMosh](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/dlai/user_avatar/community.deeplearning.ai/tmosh/32/9321_2.png) [@TMosh](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/TMosh)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2024, 3:41pm UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/8 "2024-06-19T15:41:35Z")
> [@fabricio](#): > > do you think the NLP specialization is worth doing? Yes. ---
**Author:** ![Ahmezz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Ahmezz](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/Ahmezz)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2024, 12:11am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/10 "2024-06-22T00:11:04Z")
There’s much more job opportunities in this field unlike computer vision which requires really expensive hardware and is probably needed in top tier companies only but usually all companies use NLP to fine tweak chatbots to adapt to their own rules and such. I’m currently working in a telecom company and most of the AI innovation team’s work is revolving around it ---
**Author:** ![Ahmezz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Ahmezz](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/Ahmezz)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2024, 1:42am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/11 "2024-06-23T01:42:50Z")
I feel like the courses focus more on the theoretical side rather than the coding side do you know a site with gradual coding challenges for NLP specifically? ( I’ve checked Kaggle but most of the projects and challenges are over the moon and usually it’s tedious to try to look for challenges take your hand through the baby steps) maybe there’s like a forum somewhere or a github including coding challenges in NLP from 0 to advanced or at least covering all the different assignments in NLP for example like a task to do all the text cleaning and normalization steps before vectorization or maybe building a word2vec model then glove then LMs using n-grams then transformers and so on ---
**Author:** ![TMosh](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/dlai/user_avatar/community.deeplearning.ai/tmosh/32/9321_2.png) [@TMosh](https://community.deeplearning.ai/u/TMosh)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2024, 4:09am UTC](https://community.deeplearning.ai/t/i-want-advice-on-starting-out-in-the-nlp-field/645648/12 "2024-06-23T04:09:42Z")
I know of no such all in one course or resource.