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Deep Learning & NLP Interview Questions for Data Science

3 Deep Learning & NLP questions with answers for data science roles. Tick what you have solved to track your progress.

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01

CNN vs RNN vs Transformer — what is the difference?

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CNNs use convolutions to find spatial patterns (images). RNNs/LSTMs process sequences step by step but struggle with long context. Transformers use self-attention to look at all tokens at once — parallel and better at long-range context; they power modern LLMs.
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Term Frequency × Inverse Document Frequency: a word scores high if it is frequent in one document but rare across all documents. A classic way to turn text into numeric features.
03

Why do we use activation functions? Why is ReLU popular?

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Activations add non-linearity so networks can learn complex patterns. ReLU (max(0, x)) is cheap and reduces vanishing gradients compared with sigmoid/tanh; Leaky ReLU avoids 'dead' neurons.