Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models: Theory, Hand-on Codes, and Case Studies

The open access book unlocks the full potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) through a comprehensive and hands-on guide that bridges foundational theory and cutting-edge practice.Whether you're a student, researcher, or industry practitioner, it enables you to build and deploy state-of-the-art NLP models-from classical statistical approaches to modern neural architectures and large language models (LLMs)-with confidence and clarity. Unlike traditional texts that focus solely on concepts, this book offers a practical journey through real-world NLP applications, including sentiment analysis, information extraction, summarization, text matching, question answering, and machine translation.Each chapter is grounded in executable code and datasets, presented in the form of Jupyter Notebooks hosted on Baidu AI Studio.Readers can access free cloud-based resources to run, test, and modify models, making the learning experience interactive and scalable. Designed for senior undergraduate