Latest NLP Interview Questions & Answers 2026 updated

Top NLP Interview Questions 2026

1. What is NLP, and where is it used?

Alright, here’s the lowdown on NLP or Natural Language Processing, the bit of AI that makes computers understand human language. You can find this everywhere. Starting from chatbots and even including assistants for filtering in search engines. 

In interviews, definition plus application is key. For example, companies use NLP for customer support, recommendation systems, or analyzing medical records. This is one of the most NLP interview questions for freshers because it tests both clarity and awareness.

2. What is tokenization? BPE vs WordPiece vs Unigram

Tokenization divides text into smaller chunks, a common topic in many NLP interviews. 

BPE (Byte Pair Encoding): replaces frequent character pairs with new tokens. 

WordPiece: finds the most probable tokens based on likelihood, and is widely used in BERT.

Unigram: begins with a broad vocabulary and reduces it to retain only essential tokens.

Today, subword methods like WordPiece and Unigram dominate because they handle rare words better.

3. Stemming vs lemmatization: which to use?

Another standard NLP viva question:

Stemming: faster, rough cuts (“studies” → “studi”).

Lemmatization: accurate, grammar-based (“studies” → “study”).

If speed matters, go stemming. If accuracy matters, choose lemmatization.

4. Bag of Words vs TF- IDF vs embeddings

This is a classic interview question in NLP because it shows how text representation has evolved.

Bag of Words: counts words, simple but context-free.

TF-IDF: weighs rare yet meaningful words.

Embeddings: map words to vectors that capture meaning.

In 2026, embeddings dominate, but mentioning the older methods shows you know the foundations of NLP interview questions and answers.

5. What are contextual embeddings?

Contextual embeddings are way smarter; they'll actually tweak the meaning depending on what’s around. So “bank” is just “bank,” whether you’re talking about rivers or cash. So, “river bank” and “money bank” finally get their own flavor.

This has become one of the trending interview questions NLP recruiters ask to check if you’re up to date.

6. How do transformers and attention work?

Then transformers came in and just blew up the whole scene. Instead of slogging through sentences one word at a time like some slowpoke, they take in the whole sentence (or chunk) at once.

This often appears in advanced NLP interview questions.

7. What is fine-tuning a transformer?

Fine-tuning is often involved with a pre-trained model and using it to refine with your own dataset. Instead of creating it from scratch, using existing knowledge is better to adapt. 

For small datasets, fine-tune only the last few layers. With more data, you can fine-tune deeper. These are the most common NLP interview questions for freshers today.

8. What is prompt engineering? Zero-shot vs Few-shot

Prompt engineering is about framing questions in a way models can understand.

Zero-shot is when you toss the AI a task and say, “Figure it out, genius,” with zero hand-holding. 

A few shots are you dropping in a couple of examples like, “Hey, do it like this, but, you know, with this new thing.”

This is now a favorite NLP interview question GitHub discussions cover since generative AI took off.

9. What is RAG, and when to use it?

RAG — Retrieval Augmented Generation. One part goes out and grabs info from a pile of documents, and the other part actually writes the answer. Like a research assistant who can also write your essays.

Interviewers often test this as part of advanced NLP interview questions because it blends knowledge retrieval with generative models.

10. Which evaluation metrics matter?

Different tasks need different metrics:

Precision, recall, and F1-score for classification.

BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR for translation and summarization.

Perplexity for language modeling.

This is one of the NLP viva questions you can’t skip.

11. How to spot and reduce hallucinations and bias?

Hallucinations happen when models generate wrong but confident answers. Bias shows up when training data leans unfairly.

Ways to reduce them:

Use retrieval methods like RAG.

Audit and filter training data.

Involve humans in evaluation.

Highlighting ethics shows depth in NLP interview questions and answers.

Key production challenges to mention

Deploying NLP models isn’t smooth sailing. You might face:

Latency: Large models are slow.

Cost: serving big models is expensive.

Data drift: models lose accuracy as data changes.

These challenges often appear in interview questions in NLP as companies want real-world awareness.

12. How to handle OOV and domain shift?

Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words used to be a big problem. Subword tokenization solved most of it, but domain shift when a model trained on one field is applied to another is trickier.

Solutions: domain-specific fine-tuning or augmentation. Among advanced NLP interview questions, this test requires practical thinking.

13. Common coding tasks in NLP interviews?

Expect to:

Build a simple tokenizer.

Write TF-IDF logic.

Train a basic classifier.

Work with Hugging Face pipelines.

Many candidates check NLP interview questions on GitHub repositories for these, but practicing them yourself is what really builds confidence.

14. Advanced topics to expect: LoRA and quantization

Some interviewers now ask about techniques for working with large models:

LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation): that’s the trick where you tweak big models without having to mess with all the bazillion parameters.

Quantization: reduces model size to speed up inference.

These are hot advanced NLP interview questions in 2026.

Final Thoughts

So, if you’re cramming for those NLP interview questions, keep this in mind:

Be ready for both basic NLP viva questions and technical coding tasks.

Study NLP interview questions and answers from real-world setups.

Explore NLP interview questions, GitHub resources, but also practice hands-on.

Revise advanced NLP interview questions like transformers, RAG, and quantization.

If you are looking to strengthen your expertise, Sprintzeal offers specialized training programs in AI and machine learning, NLP that help professionals stay ahead in their careers. With structured learning and real-world case studies, it can be a valuable step toward mastering your skills.

Learn effective interview skills here.