Course detail
Natural Language Processing
FIT-ZPDAcad. year: 2024/2025
Foundations of the natural language processing, historical perspective, statistical NLP and modern era dominated by machine learning and, specifically, deep neural networks. Meaning of individual words, lexicology and lexicography, word senses and neural architectures for computing word embeddings, word sense classification and inferrence. Constituency and dependency parsing, syntactic ambiguity, neural dependency parsers. Language modeling and its applications in general architectures. Machine translation, historical perspective on the statistical approach, neural translation and evaluation scores. End-to-end models, attention mechanisms, limits of current seq2seq models. Question answering based on neural models, information extraction components, text understanding challenges, learning by reading and machine comprehension. Text classification and its modern applications, convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. Language-independent representations, non-standard texts from social networks, representing parts of words, subword models. Contextual representations and pretraining for context-dependent language modules. Transformers and self-attention for generative models. Communication agents and natural language generation. Coreference resolution and its interconnection to other text understanding components.
- Distributional word semantics, Word2Vec, Glove, and FastText models
- Language modelling
- Machine translation
- Seq2seq models and attention mechanism
- Question answering
- Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification
- Modeling contexts of use: Contextual representations and pretraining
- Transformers and self-attention for generative models
- Natural language generation
- Coreference resolution
Language of instruction
Mode of study
Guarantor
Entry knowledge
Rules for evaluation and completion of the course
Lectures and a preparation of a report.
Aims
The students will get acquainted with natural language processing and will understand a range of neural network models that are commonly applied in the field. They will also grasp basics of neural implementations of attention mechanisms and sequence embedding models and how these modular components can be combined to build state of the art NLP systems. They will be able to implement and to evaluate common neural network models for various NLP applications.
Students will improve their programming skills and their knowledge and practical experience with tools for deep learning as well as with general processing of textual data.
Study aids
Prerequisites and corequisites
Basic literature
Recommended reading
Goldberg, Yoav. "Neural network methods for natural language processing." Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies 10, no. 1 (2017): 1-309.
Classification of course in study plans
- Programme DIT Doctoral 0 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
- Programme DIT Doctoral 0 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
- Programme DIT-EN Doctoral 0 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
- Programme DIT-EN Doctoral 0 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
- Programme CSE-PHD-4 Doctoral
branch DVI4 , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
- Programme CSE-PHD-4 Doctoral
branch DVI4 , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
- Programme CSE-PHD-4 Doctoral
branch DVI4 , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
Type of course unit
Lecture
Teacher / Lecturer
Syllabus
- Introduction, history of NLP, and modern approaches based on deep learning
- Word senses and word vector
- Dependency parsing
- Language models
- Machine translation
- Seq2seq models and attention
- Question answering
- Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification
- Information from parts of words: Subword models
- Modeling contexts of use: Contextual representations and pretraining
- Transformers and self-attention for generative models
- Natural language generation
- Coreference resolution
Guided consultation in combined form of studies
Teacher / Lecturer