Yesterday, I took the time to go through 31 pages of my own notes on NLP, notes I had carefully created during an AI engineering course. However, I found that I understood very little of it.
It felt odd and disheartening to have written something down yet not grasp it. I initially thought the issue was with me. But that wasn't the case. The real issue was that simply reading notes does not equate to true learning. My notes were packed with information intended for a version of me that already had some understanding, and you can't develop comprehension just by rereading a summary. So, I decided to change my approach. Instead of reading, I had the concepts explained to me one question at a time, starting from the basics, using only simple examples. No technical terms were permitted until I had proven I could understand them.
By the end of the day, I had reconstructed the four main concepts of practical NLP from the ground up, and I used them to create a functioning app that answers questions based on my own notes. Here's the complete journey, with the same examples that finally helped me understand, along with the code for each step so you can follow along.
Start with the dumbest possible question
