24 June 2025

#NLP

#NLP

Key Concepts


S.No Topic Sub-Topics
1Introduction to NLPDefinition, History, Applications, Challenges, Industry trends
2Text PreprocessingTokenization, Stopword removal, Stemming, Lemmatization, Normalization
3Bag of Words & TF-IDFVectorization, Frequency count, TF-IDF, Advantages, Limitations
4Word EmbeddingsWord2Vec, GloVe, FastText, Contextual embeddings, Use cases
5Language ModelsDefinition, Types (n-gram, neural), Training, Applications, Evaluation
6Part-of-Speech TaggingPOS tags, Tagging techniques, Rule-based, Statistical, Evaluation metrics
7Named Entity Recognition (NER)Definition, Applications, Techniques, Libraries, Challenges
8Syntax & ParsingDependency parsing, Constituency parsing, Parse trees, Applications, Tools
9Sentiment AnalysisPolarity detection, Techniques, Lexicon-based, ML-based, Applications
10Text ClassificationSupervised learning, Feature extraction, Algorithms, Evaluation, Use cases
11Topic ModelingLDA, NMF, Applications, Preprocessing, Evaluation
12Word Sense DisambiguationDefinition, Techniques, Knowledge-based, Supervised, Evaluation
13Machine TranslationRule-based, Statistical, Neural MT, Evaluation, Challenges
14Question Answering SystemsDefinition, Types, Techniques, Datasets, Applications
15Speech Recognition & NLPASR, Pipeline, Feature extraction, Speech-to-text, Applications
16Text SummarizationExtractive, Abstractive, Techniques, Evaluation, Tools
17Information RetrievalSearch engines, Indexing, Ranking, Query processing, Evaluation
18Information ExtractionDefinition, Named entities, Relationships, Event extraction, Tools
19Coreference ResolutionDefinition, Techniques, Rule-based, ML-based, Applications
20Text GenerationLanguage models, Techniques, GPT, Applications, Evaluation
21Dialogue Systems & ChatbotsRule-based, ML-based, Retrieval-based, Generative, Applications
22Deep Learning for NLPRNN, LSTM, GRU, Transformers, Applications
23Transformers & BERTArchitecture, Attention mechanism, Pretrained models, Fine-tuning, Applications
24Named Entity LinkingDefinition, Knowledge bases, Techniques, Applications, Challenges
25Text Similarity & Semantic SearchCosine similarity, Embeddings, Semantic search, Applications, Tools
26Evaluation Metrics in NLPAccuracy, Precision, Recall, F1-score, BLEU, ROUGE
27Pretrained NLP ModelsGPT, BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, Use cases
28NLP in Industry ApplicationsHealthcare, Finance, E-commerce, Social media, Customer support
29Ethics & Bias in NLPBias in data, Fairness, Mitigation strategies, Privacy, Regulatory compliance
30Future Trends in NLPMultilingual models, Large language models, Conversational AI, Explainability, Research directions

Interview question

Basic

  1. What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
  2. What is the difference between NLP, NLU, and NLG?
  3. What is a corpus in NLP?
  4. What is a token in NLP?
  5. What is tokenization?
  6. What is stemming?
  7. What is lemmatization?
  8. What is stop-word removal?
  9. What are n-grams?
  10. What is Bag of Words (BoW)?
  11. What is TF-IDF?
  12. What is a vocabulary in NLP?
  13. What is part-of-speech (POS) tagging?
  14. What is named entity recognition (NER)?
  15. What is word sense disambiguation?
  16. What is a language model?
  17. What is the difference between rule-based and statistical NLP?
  18. What is text normalization?
  19. What is stemming vs lemmatization difference?
  20. What is cosine similarity?
  21. What is Jaccard similarity?
  22. What is stop-word filtering used for?
  23. What is Bag-of-Characters?
  24. What is the use of a tokenizer in NLP pipelines?
  25. What is the difference between document and corpus?

Intermediate

  1. What is Word2Vec?
  2. What is the difference between CBOW and Skip-Gram?
  3. What is GloVe embedding?
  4. What is fastText?
  5. What are contextual embeddings?
  6. What is the difference between static and contextual embeddings?
  7. What is a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model?
  8. What is attention mechanism?
  9. What is beam search decoding?
  10. What is language translation using Seq2Seq?
  11. What is BLEU score?
  12. What is perplexity in language models?
  13. What is stemming drawback vs lemmatization?
  14. What is dependency parsing?
  15. What is constituency parsing?
  16. What is co-reference resolution?
  17. What is LSTM and why is it used in NLP?
  18. What is GRU and how is it different from LSTM?
  19. What is a sentence embedding?
  20. What is transformer architecture in NLP?
  21. What are positional encodings?
  22. What is masked language modelling (MLM)?
  23. What is causal language modelling (CLM)?
  24. What is subword tokenization (BPE, WordPiece)?
  25. What are stop-word lists disadvantages?

Advanced

  1. What is BERT and how does it work?
  2. What is RoBERTa and how is it different from BERT?
  3. What is DistilBERT?
  4. What is GPT and how is it different from BERT?
  5. What is XLNet?
  6. What is ALBERT and why is it memory-efficient?
  7. What is ELECTRA?
  8. What is T5 architecture?
  9. What is Sentence-BERT (SBERT)?
  10. What is zero-shot text classification?
  11. What is few-shot learning in NLP?
  12. What is contrastive learning in NLP?
  13. Explain the architecture of a transformer encoder.
  14. Explain the architecture of a transformer decoder.
  15. What is multi-head attention?
  16. What is self-attention and why is it important?
  17. What is cross-attention?
  18. What are hallucinations in LLMs?
  19. What is prompt engineering?
  20. What is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)?
  21. What is vector search / embedding search?
  22. What is tokenizer vocabulary explosion?
  23. What is domain adaptation in NLP models?
  24. What is perplexity and how to interpret it?
  25. What is gradient checkpointing used for in NLP models?

Expert

  1. Explain BERT pre-training objectives (MLM + NSP).
  2. What is the difference between fine-tuning and pre-training in NLP?
  3. How does Llama architecture differ from GPT architecture?
  4. What is the scaling law for LLMs?
  5. What is chain-of-thought prompting?
  6. What is reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in NLP?
  7. What is DPO (Direct Preference Optimization)?
  8. What is PPO in language model training?
  9. What is KV cache in transformers?
  10. What are Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models?
  11. How does sparsity improve LLM inference?
  12. What is quantization in NLP models (INT8, 4-bit, GPTQ)?
  13. What is pruning in transformer models?
  14. What is distillation in LLMs?
  15. What is the difference between encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder-decoder models?
  16. What is catastrophic forgetting in NLP?
  17. Explain how embeddings are stored in vector databases.
  18. What is knowledge grounding?
  19. How does token-level attention differ from sentence-level attention?
  20. How are position embeddings handled in rotary embeddings (RoPE)?
  21. What is ALiBi attention?
  22. What are LoRA adapters and how do they help fine-tuning?
  23. What is SFT (supervised fine-tuning)?
  24. What is hallucination mitigation in NLP systems?
  25. What is the future direction of NLP research?

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