I’m working on an NLP project where the model shows strong training performance and reasonable offline metrics, but once we move to validation and limited production-style testing, performance drops noticeably.

The data pipeline, preprocessing steps, and model architecture are consistent across stages, so this doesn’t feel like a simple setup issue. My suspicion is that the problem sits somewhere between data distribution shifts, tokenization choices, or subtle leakage in the training setup that doesn’t hold up outside the training window.

I’m trying to understand how others diagnose this in practice:

• How do you distinguish overfitting from dataset shift in NLP workloads?
• What signals do you look at beyond standard metrics to catch generalization issues early?
• Are there common preprocessing or labeling assumptions that often break when moving closer to production text?

Looking for practical debugging approaches or patterns others have seen when moving NLP models from training to real usage.

I am currently working as Media Analyst with extremely great WLB and around 45k salary. Before joining current organization I was working as Business Intelligence Analyst Intern with absolutely no WLB and 40k salary at the end of which I got diagnosed with a medical condition which forced me to take my current job. Now, that I am fit and doing well. I am stuck with almost a year and half of no coding practise ( which already I was not pretty good at ) and low salary and feeling of not earning to my full potential. I am confused with what to start studying now, Data Science or DevOps. Would appreciate some honest (even if harsh) suggestions

When working with petabyte-scale datasets using distributed frameworks like Hadoop or Spark, what strategies, configurations, or code-level optimizations do you apply to reduce processing time and resource usage? Any key lessons from handling performance bottlenecks or data skew?

In a world flooded with dashboards and data charts, not all visualizations lead to action. Sometimes, they look good but don’t help decision-makers understand what to do next. That’s why I’m curious, when you create or evaluate data visualizations, what frameworks or methods do you rely on to make sure they’re not just informative, but actually actionable?