What is the first step in building an NLP solution?

The initial step in building an NLP solution involves collecting a substantial amount of raw text data and then pre-processing it. This step is critical as the quality and quantity of the data directly impact the performance of the NLP model.

Pre-processing includes activities such as tokenization, where text is split into manageable pieces (words, phrases, etc.), removing stop words, stemming, and lemmatization, which help standardize the text for the model. This phase also addresses any noise in the data and ensures that it is formatted appropriately for analysis. By starting with a comprehensive and clean corpus, subsequent steps like developing a machine learning model can be executed more effectively, leading to better outcomes in tasks such as sentiment analysis, language translation, or other NLP applications.

Other options focus on later stages of the project. Designing the user interface is important but comes after the foundational aspects of data collection and processing. Developing a machine learning model is a crucial step that relies heavily on the quality of the prepared data. Continuous deployment, while essential for maintaining and updating applications, is not part of the initial phase of building an NLP solution.