Our first section will be taught by Arpan Chakraborty. Arpan has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and for several years, has taught at Udacity and at Georgia Tech. Hi Arpan. Hi Luis. Hello everyone. I’m glad to get you started on your journey through Natural Language Processing. Everything in NLP starts with raw text typically, produced by humans like you and me, and Luis here. This text is first processed using some simple transformations such as, splitting it into individual words, reducing verbs to their root form, et cetera. You need to do this before performing any other analysis or training complex models. This stage may sound simple but you have to be careful about how you process your raw text. It may affect the results you obtain further down the line. Ready? Let’s do it.