My suggestion: get an access to databases of academic journals and try to read research papers. You probably won't understand most of it at first, but you should get an idea of the subject's terminology and main approaches.
I did that (no formal education, primary interest being in computational linguistics, YMMV) and found reading original papers a compelling and effective way of learning.
I did that (no formal education, primary interest being in computational linguistics, YMMV) and found reading original papers a compelling and effective way of learning.