Natural Language Processing (NLP)
3.1 Basics of NLP
Language models, tokenization, stemming, lemmatization.
Bag-of-words, TF-IDF.
3.2 Word Embeddings
Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText.
Contextual embeddings: ELMo, BERT, GPT.
3.3 Syntax and Semantics
POS tagging, parsing, dependency trees.
Named Entity Recognition (NER), coreference resolution.
3.4 Sequence Models
RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs.
Attention mechanism.
Transformer architecture.
3.5 Applications
Machine translation, sentiment analysis, question answering.
3.6 Evaluation Metrics
Accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, BLEU, ROUGE.
3.7 Challenges in NLP
Ambiguity, context understanding, low-resource languages.
Blockchain and Cryptography
4.1 Cryptographic Foundations
Symmetric vs asymmetric cryptography.
Hash functions (SHA-256), digital signatures (RSA, ECDSA).
4.2 Blockchain Basics
Structure of a block, hash chaining.
Distributed ledger and consensus.
4.3 Consensus Algorithms
Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
Byzantine fault tolerance.
4.4 Smart Contracts
Ethereum, Solidity programming.
Decentralized applications (dApps).
4.5 Security and Privacy
51% attacks, Sybil attacks.
Zero-knowledge proofs, zk-SNARKs.
4.6 Applications Beyond Cryptocurrency
Supply chain, healthcare, identity verification.