Mental Scaffolding
Mental Scaffolding¶
Technical concepts in general can be difficult to understand, and NLP is no different. For me to teach NLP to mixed audiences, I had to create a learning framework for myself and my audience, so that I could understand how to communicate key concepts in the space and at the same time help my audience to follow my train of thought and understand NLP just a bit better.
To that end, I created for myself a learning and planning framework for NLP which I call the NLP toolbox. Below is an excerpt from an article I wrote outlining this thought process:
EXCERPT
First things first:
We are unique people learning in a dynamic world.
It is no secret that the path to learning is not the same for everyone. It can be incredibly challenging for some and quite straightforward and smooth for others.
Quick hacks can be great when you want to cram key information before an important meeting where you have to have all the answers. However, if you are in the world of tech, you know that new concepts, ideas and tools are being created rapidly — this means that in a day or a couple of weeks, what you crammed for that meeting may be irrelevant by the time you are ready to present.
You need to understand key underlying concepts, so that your knowledge can stand the test of time and these concepts can be applied and/or combined in new ways. Use of meta-tools can help people to understand technical concepts and apply them in the real world.
Scaffolding is a learning theory initially conceived by Vygotsky where
a learner uses structured support provided by a teacher or more advanced student
which is used to learn a challenging concept, slightly above their level of understanding
until the student no longer needs the support, enabling the teacher/more advanced student to fade away
It is important to note that
Just like scaffolding can be provided by a teacher to make the learning process faster,
the learner can create for themselves and others their own scaffolding.
As part of my Delta Analytics fellowship, I had to complete a multilingual NLP project (which I had never done before) and present my work in a short amount of time — I had to have tools that could help me understand the NLP concepts that I was struggling with and at the same time structure my project. Even with an incredibly helpful coach, I had to figure out stuff for myself.
I had no choice; I had to create my own mental scaffolding.
My scaffolding was the NLP toolbox, which I created to help myself and others seeking to understand and implement an NLP project — end-to-end. After all, understanding and implementing NLP projects is crucial to their success.
The NLP toolbox is a collection of concepts, tools and ideas available for building applications that can handle
real-world challenges around understanding content from all over the world.
It can be used for any NLP task such as sentiment analysis, translation, transcription, audio synthesis etc.