In an NLP course, students should be introduced to several essential Python packages that form the foundation of natural language processing. NLTK (Natural Language Toolkit) is a classic library, ideal for tasks like tokenization, stemming, and parsing, making it great for beginners. spaCy is highly efficient for large-scale operations, excelling in named entity recognition (NER), part-of-speech tagging, and dependency parsing. For topic modeling and word embeddings, Gensim stands out, offering tools for tasks such as LDA modeling. A must-have in modern NLP workflows is Transformers by Hugging Face, which provides pre-trained models for complex tasks like sentiment analysis, translation, and text generation using architectures like BERT and GPT. For simpler tasks, TextBlob offers user-friendly APIs for sentiment analysis, language detection, and text classification. Together, these libraries enable students to build a strong practical understanding of both traditional and cutting-edge NLP techniques. .