Introduction

According to statista, the total volume of data worldwide in 2020 is equal to 149 zettabytes. With the global data volume being that large, and growing faster by the year, it is clear that the ability to efficiently store data has become one of the key challenges in computer science. In this article we’ll explore one of the most used structures to store data: a hash table.

What is a hash table?

A hash table is a data structure that is used to store data. Initially it looks a lot like an array or a list but it separates itself from those by allowing for…

Introduction

Finding patterns (or substrings) in a piece of text is a very common action on computers. Just think about the amount of times you’ve used the shortcut ‘ctrl+f’ to find a word hidden somewhere in a large body of text. Or think about the amount of times you’ve used a search engine to find something on a website or on the internet. Pattern matching is everywhere in computer science and it’s a common subject for job interviews at tech companies. So plenty of reasons to make yourself more familiar with this handy piece of coding magic!

In this article we’ll…

Introduction

Natural Language Processing (often called NLP) is a foundational part of computer science. In fact, the ability for computers to communicate with humans in a natural language is an ambition that goes back to the very moment computers were invented.

With the development of machine learning the progress in this field has skyrocketed. Just look at the increase of papers published in NLP (see graph below) over the last couple of years. However, to make natural language fit for machine learning, some work has to be done.