Preface

With the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 and GPT-4 in early 2023, there is an ignited interest in natural language processing (NLP) including large language models (LLMs). You will find this book very helpful if you are picking it up hoping to get a start with NLP, learn and build the NLP techniques that have matured in the past few decades, or understand the differences between pre-LLM and LLM techniques. With the NLP development in the past four decades, there have been many commercial NLP products built on pre-LLM techniques, such as Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) or called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and Ensemble LDA.

With the help of this book, you will not only get started with NLP to build NLP models but also get equipped with some background knowledge of LLMs. We believe the concepts covered in this book will be the necessary bridge for anyone new who comes to NLP, who wants to build NLP products, and who wants to learn LLMs.