Introduction

This chapter serves as an introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP), defining the field and its core research areas. It provides a historical overview of NLP methods, starting with early template and rule-based approaches, moving to corpus-based statistical methods that include generative and discriminative models, and culminating in the current neural network-based methods, such as Transformers and large language models (LLMs). The chapter outlines the book's structure, which will focus on neural network techniques, covering basic models, key technologies, and application systems. Finally, it introduces the practical implementation platform used for the book's exercises, Baidu's PaddlePaddle, and provides details on its setup, along with the specific APIs and datasets that will be used.