What are the necessary skills needed to specialize in natural language processing? I am currently taking a course in Automata and Formal Languages and I have been fascinated by the ideas of languages. Context-free grammars, turing machines, parsing, chomsky normal form, it's really sparked my interest. And currently at my job we work with large data sets. Some of the research team works with semantics, NLP, and machine learning. I am very new to this field, and I was wondering what I can do to tailor my skill sets to work with things like this. How do I make that switch from begginner to not-beginner?

