People to Follow in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Overview

• Text analytics is becoming easier with many people working day and night on each aspect of Natural Language Processing
• We list a set of people to follow in the field NLP Feel we should include anyone else? Let us know!

Introduction

Natural Language Processing has made unstructured text data analysis simpler. With numerous applications, NLP is affecting and adding values to millions of lives. But the problem NLP practitioners face is catching up with the changes that happen in this field. I personally tried to keep a tab on the continuous changes and developments happening in this field but failed miserably for a long time.

While there were myriad answers, the simplest and the most feasible one is to just follow the people who are already experts in this domain. Following these people will help you learn, build perspectives around various topics, and keep you updated with the latest developments. Also, you get to know the best practices used by the domain experts which makes you a better data scientist.

In this article, I have put together a list of the people you should follow in the field of NLP. Keep in mind, following others is important not just in the field of natural language processing but in any field. It is one of the easiest things that you can do with an insanely high ROI.

In case you are looking for a list of people to follow for Machine Learning, check out this article:

• Heroes of Machine Learning – Top Experts and Researchers you should follow

So let’s get started.

Christopher Manning

Christopher D Manning, Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics, Stanford University on Wednesday, May 14, 2014, at Stanford University. ( Photo by Norbert von der Groeben )

First person on this list of people to follow in the field of NLP is Christopher Manning. Christopher is currently the Director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and the Professor of Computer Science and Linguistics at Stanford. He is a co-author of some excellent textbooks such as Introduction to Information Retrieval and Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing.

He is also the instructor of famous course CS224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning. Manning is a leader in the field of Natural Language Processing and well known for his research on the GloVe model, neural machine translation, sentiment analysis, question answering, neural network dependency parsing, and deep language understanding. You can follow him and his works on the links below-

• Stanford
• Twitter
• Google Scholar

Abhishek Thakur

If you’re the one who loves participating in NLP hackathons and competing for the winning prizes, then here is someone you must follow.

Abhishek Thakur is the world’s first 4x Grandmaster at Kaggle and currently Chief Data Scientist at boost.ai. He has many kernels dedicated to techniques and concepts of natural language processing. Also, he has a YouTube Channel where he posts content around natural language processing and other fields of data science. The link to his YouTube Channel, kaggle and other accounts here –

• Kaggle
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Twitter
• GitHub

Susan Li

Susan Li is an author on medium but not just any author. She has over 20k followers on medium. She has been writing beautifully crafted articles around various topics of data science, notably natural language processing for years.

If you’re like me who loves reading blogs a lot, then, she is the one you must follow. She has this great skill in explaining tricky topics of natural language processing in the easiest way possible. Apart from this, she is currently working as a Senior Data Scientist at Kognitiv Corporation.

To read her articles on medium, you can follow her on the links below-

• Medium
• LinkedIn

Dan Jurafsky

Dan Jurafsky is currently the Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received McArthur fellowship in 2002 and is known for developing the first automatic system for Semantic Role Labelling with Daniel Gildea.

Dan is an active researcher in the field of Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, Computational Linguistics, and Computational Social Science. He is also the author of a must-read book Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Here are some links for you to follow and stay updated-

• Stanford
• Google Scholar
• Twitter

Rachel Thomas

If you’re in the field of NLP for some time, then I am sure that you are already familiar with her. Rachel Thomas is a Computer Scientist and the Director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics at the University of San Fransisco. She is also the co-founder of fast.ai.

She is the instructor of fast.ai’s famous course on natural language processing and is known for her ability to explain complex terms easily. Fast.ai’s NLP course is a must for those who like the code-first approach. Forbes also listed her in their list of “20 Incredible Women in AI”.

• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Sebastian Ruder

Sebastian Ruder is currently a Research Scientist at DeepMind. He is an active researcher in the field of natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning.

Also, he is a blogger and frequently writes around natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning. Further, he releases a newsletter that contains the latest news, resources, papers, and much more from the field of natural language processing.  He is always interested in transfer learning for NLP and making ML and NLP more accessible. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter, and check out his website and GitHub page on the links below-

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Google Scholar
• Website
• GitHub

Thomas Wolf

We all know about Hugging Face and how popular their work is in the whole NLP community. Therefore, I have someone on this list who is behind the amazing work done by Hugging Face.

Thomas Wolf is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer (CSO) at Hugging Face. He is an active researcher in the field of Natural Language Generation and Natural Language Understanding. Also, he is a blogger and writes around Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning. Apart from this, he has some open-source projects on GitHub, which has thousands of stars.

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• GitHub

Rachael Tatman

Which is better? Learning about a tool and knowing how to use it OR learning about a tool and knowing how to use it in the best way.

I’m sure all of you will find the latter one a better option. Therefore, I have Rachael Tatman on this list. She is a popular live streaming coder who regularly streams live coding on Twitch. The best part about live coding is that you get to know how a data scientist approaches a problem, how he debugs the code, and finally solves a problem.

In addition, Rachael Tatman is currently a Senior Developer Advocate at RASA and a Grandmaster at Kaggle. Prior to this, she was a data scientist at Kaggle. She has a Ph.D. in Computational Sociolinguistics.

• LinkedIn
• Kaggle
• Twitter
• Twitch

Ilya Sutskever

The next person on this list is someone without whom we couldn’t have the sequence to sequence learning. Yes, as you might have already guessed it. I am talking about the person who invented sequence to sequence learning.

Ilya Sutskever is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Before that, he was a Research Scientist at Google Brain. Ilya with Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le. invented the sequence to sequence learning.

But his contributions are not limited to just this. He is also the co-inventor of AlexNet, AlphaGO, and TensorFlow. He is someone who should be followed by anyone who interested in the field of Data Science, not just NLP.

• LinkedIn
• Google Scholar
• Twitter

Edward Ma

As I mentioned earlier how much I love reading blogs, therefore, I have listed Edward Ma in this list because he is a good author on medium and regularly writes amazing articles around updates and topics of natural language processing.

Currently, Edward is a data scientist at OOCL. You should follow him if you love reading blogs around NLP and want to stay updated about the recent researches in the field of NLP.

• Medium
• GitHub
• Website

Endnotes

To summarize, in this article, I showcased ten people you should follow in the field of NLP. By no means, I am comparing them with anyone else. They are one of their kind and precious jewels of the NLP field. They are an inspiration for everyone who wants to make a career in this field. 

If you want to learn and make a career in Natural Language Processing, check out our course-

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) Using Python

If you found this article informative, then please share it with your friends. Among all of these, how many are you currently following? Also, is there anyone else whom I should have included in this list of people to follow in the field of NLP? Please comment down below.

Abhishek Sharma

He is a data science aficionado, who loves diving into data and generating insights from it. He is always ready for making machines to learn through code and writing technical blogs. His areas of interest include Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing still open for something new and exciting.