This is part one of a three part series but those wanting a brief introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP) should feel free to attend just this session. Human language/communication can be studied computationally through NLP. We’ll explore the basics of NLP using Python and PyTorch; no prior machine learning experience is necessary, basic Python knowledge is helpful but not necessary. We will create a bigram character model and use it to generate random first names of people; we will build statistical and neural network implementations.