NLP Puzzles

A hands-on NLP/ML curriculum for trainees and juniors who already know basic Python, ML and want to get production-ready in AI/ML engineering from embeddings to production APIs.

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How to Study

Each puzzle follows the same flow:

1. Read README.md — start with theory. Understand the concepts before touching any code.

2. Work through learning/ notebooks — run cells, tweak parameters, break things. The goal is intuition, not just output.

3. Solve tasks/ notebooks — cells are empty, you fill them in. Each task has assert statements at the bottom — you're done when they all pass. Don't look at solutions until you've genuinely tried.

4. Do the Q&A — open QUESTIONS.md, try to answer each question out loud or in writing before reading the answer. These are the questions you'll get in interviews.

Solutions are in solutions/ — use them to compare approaches, not as a shortcut.

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Setup

# Clone and create venv
git clone https://github.com/BioMikeUkr/nlp-puzzles.git
cd nlp-puzzles
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate

# Install dependencies for a specific puzzle
pip install -r puzzles/01_python_data_fundamentals/requirements.txt

# Launch Jupyter
jupyter notebook puzzles/01_python_data_fundamentals/learning/

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Puzzles

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Puzzle Structure

puzzles/XX_name/
├── README.md        # theory and key concepts
├── QUESTIONS.md     # 30 deep Q&A
├── requirements.txt
├── fixtures/        # sample input/output data
├── learning/        # tutorial notebooks
├── tasks/           # livecoding tasks (you solve these)
└── solutions/       # reference solutions (check after solving)