NLP

Term from Artificial Intelligence industry explained for recruiters

NLP (Natural Language Processing) is a technology that helps computers understand and work with human language. Think of it as teaching computers to read, understand, and respond to text and speech the way humans do. It's used in many everyday applications like virtual assistants (Siri, Alexa), translation services, chatbots, and tools that analyze customer feedback. When this term appears in resumes or job descriptions, it usually refers to creating or working with systems that can process text, conduct conversations, or extract meaningful information from written documents.

Examples in Resumes

Developed customer service chatbot using NLP and Natural Language Processing technologies

Implemented NLP algorithms to analyze customer feedback and generate insights

Led team in creating Natural Language Processing solutions for automated document classification

Typical job title: "NLP Engineers"

Also try searching for:

Natural Language Processing Engineer NLP Developer AI Engineer Machine Learning Engineer Language AI Developer Computational Linguist AI Research Scientist

Where to Find NLP Engineers

Example Interview Questions

Senior Level Questions

Q: How would you approach building a chatbot system from scratch?

Expected Answer: A senior candidate should explain the overall process in simple terms: planning the bot's purpose, choosing appropriate tools, ensuring it understands user input correctly, testing with real users, and continuously improving its responses based on feedback.

Q: How do you ensure your NLP solutions work well across different languages and cultures?

Expected Answer: Should discuss considerations for multiple languages, cultural differences in expression, and methods to make systems work well for diverse user groups, including testing and validation approaches.

Mid Level Questions

Q: What methods would you use to analyze customer feedback from social media?

Expected Answer: Should describe approaches for automatically categorizing feedback as positive or negative, identifying common themes or issues, and extracting useful insights from large amounts of text data.

Q: How would you improve the accuracy of a text classification system?

Expected Answer: Should explain ways to make the system better at categorizing text correctly, such as getting more training data, cleaning up the input data, and testing different approaches.

Junior Level Questions

Q: What are the basic steps in processing text for NLP applications?

Expected Answer: Should explain simple concepts like breaking text into words, removing unnecessary words, and preparing text for analysis in a way that computers can understand.

Q: Can you explain what sentiment analysis is and its common uses?

Expected Answer: Should be able to explain that sentiment analysis determines if text is positive, negative, or neutral, and give examples like analyzing product reviews or social media posts.

Experience Level Indicators

Junior (0-2 years)

  • Basic text processing and analysis
  • Working with common NLP tools and libraries
  • Simple chatbot development
  • Basic sentiment analysis

Mid (2-5 years)

  • Building custom NLP solutions
  • Text classification and categorization
  • Integration of NLP services
  • Performance optimization of NLP systems

Senior (5+ years)

  • Advanced NLP system architecture
  • Multiple language support
  • Large-scale NLP deployment
  • Team leadership and project management

Red Flags to Watch For

  • No practical experience with real-world NLP applications
  • Lack of understanding of basic language processing concepts
  • No experience with popular NLP tools or platforms
  • Unable to explain NLP concepts in simple terms