Aim
This course provides participants with a comprehensive understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP), focusing on how computers can be trained to understand, interpret, and generate human language. Participants will learn essential techniques used in NLP such as text preprocessing, tokenization, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and named entity recognition (NER). The course will also cover advanced models like transformers and attention mechanisms, which power state-of-the-art NLP applications.
Program Objectives
- Learn the fundamental techniques in NLP such as text preprocessing, tokenization, and part-of-speech tagging.
- Explore advanced NLP models including transformers, BERT, and GPT.
- Apply NLP techniques to real-world problems such as sentiment analysis, machine translation, and named entity recognition.
- Gain hands-on experience using popular NLP libraries like NLTK, spaCy, and Hugging Face.
- Learn how to evaluate NLP models and fine-tune them for specific tasks.
Program Structure
Module 1: Introduction to Natural Language Processing
- Overview of Natural Language Processing and its importance in AI.
- Text preprocessing: tokenization, stopword removal, and stemming/lemmatization.
- Understanding text representations: Bag-of-Words, TF-IDF, and word embeddings (Word2Vec, GloVe).
- Hands-on exercise: Implementing basic NLP preprocessing techniques using Python and NLTK.
Module 2: Text Classification and Sentiment Analysis
- Introduction to text classification and sentiment analysis.
- Supervised learning algorithms for text classification: Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, and SVM.
- Hands-on exercise: Building a sentiment analysis model using Scikit-learn and NLTK.
Module 3: Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Information Extraction
- Understanding Named Entity Recognition (NER) and its applications.
- Using spaCy for NER and extracting structured information from unstructured text.
- Hands-on exercise: Implementing NER for identifying people, organizations, and locations in text.
Module 4: Machine Translation and Text Generation
- Introduction to machine translation: Rule-based vs. statistical vs. neural machine translation (NMT).
- Exploring sequence-to-sequence models for text generation and translation tasks.
- Hands-on exercise: Building a simple machine translation model using Seq2Seq architecture in TensorFlow.
Module 5: Deep Learning for NLP: Transformers and BERT
- Introduction to deep learning for NLP: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM).
- Understanding transformers and attention mechanisms.
- Using pre-trained models like BERT for various NLP tasks.
- Hands-on exercise: Implementing a text classification model using a pre-trained BERT model.
Module 6: Question Answering Systems
- Building question answering systems using NLP techniques and deep learning models.
- Exploring extractive vs. generative QA models.
- Hands-on exercise: Building a simple QA system using Hugging Face Transformers library.
Module 7: NLP in Practice: Real-World Applications
- Exploring real-world applications of NLP: chatbots, voice assistants, recommendation systems.
- Case studies: How NLP is used in industries like healthcare, finance, and e-commerce.
- Hands-on exercise: Building a text summarization model or chatbot using NLP techniques.
Module 8: Model Evaluation and Optimization
- Evaluating NLP models: accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and perplexity.
- Hyperparameter tuning and optimization for NLP models.
- Hands-on exercise: Fine-tuning a pre-trained model for a specific NLP task.








