Advanced Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with techniques that enable computers to understand the meaning of text, which is written in a natural language. Thus NLP constitutes an essential part for modern text-based challenges. As a science NLP can be considered as the field, where Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Linguistics overlap.

In this course the students will learn about advanced techniques and theories of NLP. However, the lecture does not only provide the theory but also the implementation of relevant and state-of-the-art NLP procedures. Topics of this course are current approaches like language models or data programming on large natural language data sets.

By applying state-of-the-art techniques on real-world data sets students learn to extract knowledge from natural language corpora. These allow them to analyze, discover and evaluate phenomena hidden in texts.

NLP enables applications like intelligent search engines, dialog systems, question-answering systems, machine translation, document classification, sentiment analysis or opinion mining. However, the lecture does not only provide the theory but also the implementation of the relevant NLP procedures. This allows them to conduct own and ground-breaking research on given or self-crawled data from a variaty of data sources, like commercial or research-related scenarios..

1. Language models
2. Statistical semantics
3. Transformer-based NLP
4. Information extraction with data programming

The course follows a hybrid format, where lecture videos are provided online and classroom time is used for discussion, exercises, and working on a small NLP-related project.

• This course involves self-study (which can be completed online): You're expected to watch the lecture videos, read the corresponding book chapters/sections listed on the last slide of each lecture deck, as well as complete the exercises on GitHub.
• There is also a classroom component which is not obligatory, but highly recommended for an optimal learning experience. This involves discussion and exercises in a regular or virtual classroom setting.

Learning Material Provided by Lecturer

• slides and recorded lectures
• research-related project descriptions
• access to standard NLP text corpora

• Speech and language processing : an introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition (2009) by Dan Jurafsky
• Foundations of statistical natural language processing (18 June 1999) by Christopher D. Manning, Hinrich Schuetze
• Natural Language Processing with Python (2009) by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, Edward Loper
• Neural Network Methods in Natural Language Processing (Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2017) by Yoav Goldberg
• Natural Language Processing with PyTorch (O’ Reilly 2019) by D. Rao, B. MacMahan
• Natural Language Processing in Action (Manning 2019) by H. Lane, H. Hapke, C. Howard