Natural language processing (NLP) is arguably the most important subfield of linguistics that aims to extract information from qualitative text data.  While most information from public quantitative data is extracted and exhausted in various modeling scenarios scientists have increasingly turned to more qualitative data to extract new meaningful information. This course offers a gentle technical introduction to NLP using Python and discusses different approaches and applications of NLP in the real world. By the end of this course students will have a fundamental understanding of the NLP problem space.