While it would probably be a great exercise for me to actually enumerate all the things I don’t know about this field that I’ve chosen to throw myself into, it would likely take up more space than this blog can utilize. Starting into NLP as a grad assistant at the Condition-based Maintenance Center with zero experience and little support, I was more drowning than treading water. I knew I didn’t know anything so there wasn’t any uncertainty there. Then, as I started learning about information extraction, I suddenly thought I was getting a handle on this whole NLP thing. I could do some part-of-speech tagging, a little parsing, regular expressions – I was set to take on the digital information world. I got a little cocky (must have hit my teenage years). I saw myself as poised to make an impact the NLP world in general and to bring NLP to industry applications (which clearly desperately needed my help as they were wallowing in despair without me to guide them).

It is quickly becoming apparent that this was/is a case of not knowing what I don’t know. I’ve also likened it to walking down a long street and thinking you’ve almost reached your destination, when you suddenly turn a corner and a whole city (or maybe a desert or jungle) stretches between you and what you think you want to reach. That’s how I feel lately. I recently started a Big Data and Web Intelligence Coursera course, which is highly interesting and relevant to what I’m doing, but serves to demonstrate to me just now naive I was when I thought I knew a lot. So now I know that I don’t know squat. But I’m also starting to get a handle on figuring out what it is exactly that I don’t know. I think that that’s a major step in the right direction. What started as simply viewing text-based data analysis through the NLP lens is now a shared view with the equally-large text analytics realm. The small-time NLP I could do has turned into the machine learning, data mining, clustering, and text classification that I have yet to learn how to do. And that’s assuming I don’t turn another corner here in the very near future.