NLP Interview Questions and Answers
Intermediate / 1 to 5 years experienced level questions & answers
Ques 1. Explain tokenization in NLP.
Tokenization is the process of breaking text into smaller units, such as words or phrases (tokens), to facilitate analysis.
Example:
In the sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,' tokenization would result in individual tokens: ['The', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog'].
Ques 2. What is the difference between stemming and lemmatization?
Stemming reduces words to their base or root form, while lemmatization involves reducing words to their base or root form using vocabulary and morphological analysis.
Example:
For the word 'running,' stemming might produce 'run,' while lemmatization would produce 'run' as well.
Ques 3. What is the purpose of a word embedding in NLP?
Word embeddings are dense vector representations of words that capture semantic relationships. They are used to represent words in a way that computers can understand and process.
Example:
Word2Vec and GloVe are popular techniques for generating word embeddings.
Ques 4. What is the importance of attention mechanisms in NLP?
Attention mechanisms help models focus on specific parts of the input sequence when making predictions, improving their ability to capture long-range dependencies and relationships.
Example:
In machine translation, attention mechanisms allow the model to focus on relevant words in the source language when generating each word in the target language.
Ques 5. What are some common challenges in sentiment analysis?
Challenges in sentiment analysis include handling sarcasm, understanding context, and dealing with the diversity of language expressions and cultural nuances.
Example:
The phrase 'This movie is so bad, it's good!' might be challenging for sentiment analysis algorithms to interpret correctly due to sarcasm.
Ques 6. What is the purpose of a language model in NLP?
A language model is designed to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words. It helps in understanding and generating human-like text.
Example:
In a language model, given the context 'The cat is on the...', it predicts the next word, such as 'roof'.
Ques 7. Explain the concept of a word frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) matrix.
A tf-idf matrix represents the importance of words in a collection of documents by considering both the term frequency (tf) and the inverse document frequency (idf).
Example:
Each row of the matrix corresponds to a document, and each column corresponds to a unique word with tf-idf scores.
Ques 8. What is the role of pre-trained word embeddings in NLP tasks?
Pre-trained word embeddings, learned from large text corpora, capture semantic relationships between words. They are often used as input representations for NLP tasks, saving computation time and improving performance.
Example:
Word embeddings like Word2Vec and GloVe can be fine-tuned for specific tasks like sentiment analysis or named entity recognition.
Ques 9. What are some common challenges in machine translation?
Challenges include handling idiomatic expressions, preserving context, and dealing with languages with different word orders and structures.
Example:
Translating idioms like 'kick the bucket' can be challenging as a direct word-for-word translation may not convey the intended meaning.
Ques 10. What is the difference between precision and recall in NLP evaluation metrics?
Precision is the ratio of correctly predicted positive observations to the total predicted positives, while recall is the ratio of correctly predicted positive observations to all actual positives.
Example:
In information retrieval, high precision indicates few false positives, while high recall indicates capturing most relevant documents.
Ques 11. How does Word2Vec generate word embeddings, and what are its advantages?
Word2Vec generates word embeddings by predicting the context of words in a given text. Its advantages include capturing semantic relationships, dimensionality reduction, and efficiency in training.
Example:
Word2Vec can represent words with similar meanings as vectors close to each other in the embedding space.
Ques 12. Explain the concept of a Markov model in natural language processing.
A Markov model represents a sequence of states where the probability of transitioning to the next state depends only on the current state. Markov models are used in language modeling and part-of-speech tagging.
Example:
A first-order Markov model assumes the probability of the next word depends only on the current word in a sequence.
Ques 13. What is the role of a language model in speech recognition?
In speech recognition, a language model helps in predicting the likelihood of word sequences, improving the accuracy of transcriptions by considering context and language patterns.
Example:
A language model can aid in distinguishing between homophones (words that sound the same) based on contextual information.
Ques 14. What are some common challenges in named entity recognition (NER)?
Challenges in NER include handling ambiguous entities, recognizing named entities in context, and dealing with variations in entity mentions.
Example:
In biomedical texts, recognizing drug names as entities may require domain-specific knowledge and context analysis.
Ques 15. Explain the concept of a word sense disambiguation in NLP.
Word sense disambiguation aims to determine the correct meaning of a word in context when the word has multiple possible meanings.
Example:
In the sentence 'The bank is close to the river,' word sense disambiguation is needed to identify whether 'bank' refers to a financial institution or the side of a river.
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