LTAT.01.001 Natural language processing
This course aims to provide an overview of the main tasks in the field of natural language processing and to introduce the contemporary methods to address them. The course will cover tasks such as language modeling and word/sentence representations, text classification, sequence tagging for finding parts of speech or morphological features, information extraction such as named entity recognition, finding the important structural parts of a sentence as well as some higher level tasks such as machine translation, text summarisation and question answering.
During recent years, the NLP field has more and more started to use deep neural models. Thus, in this course we will look at various deep neural models that are nowadays commonly used for NLP: recurrent networks for modeling sequential data, convolutional networks for text classification, sequence to sequence models for generative tasks, attention mechanism for finding alignment between different inputs or inputs and outputs.
In addition to deep learning, we will also cover the elements of statistical learning for NLP, in particular various ways to formulate feature vectors for different tasks and how to use these feature vectors in log-linear models.
Course info
- Lectures: Wednesdays at 12:15, J. Liivi 2, room 207
- Labs: Fridays at 10:15, J. Liivi 2, room 122 (bring your own laptop)
- Lecturer: Kairit Sirts (kairit.sirts@ut.ee)
- TA: Maksym Del (maksym.del@ut.ee)
- Office hours (Kairit, room 416):
- 08.05.2019 3:30-5pm
- 16.05.2019 12-2pm
- 23.05.2019 12-2pm
- 30.05.2019 12-2pm
- 05.06.2019 12-2pm
Grading
| Type | Points | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Reading tests | 15 points | 15 reading tests, each max 1 point |
| Homeworks | 42 points | 6 homeworks, max 7 points each |
| Project | 30 points | |
| Final exam | 20 points | |
| Total | 107 points |
Prerequisites
This course assumes knowledge from various areas. In Study Information System, the required prerequisite course is Machine Learning (MTAT.03.227) and the recommended prerequisite courses are Language Technology (MTAT.06.045) and Artificial Intelligence I (MTAT.06.008). In practice, we also assume the basic knowledge of higher math (calculus, linear algebra, probabilities) and computer programming (python). If you lack some of the required knowledge then it is your responsibility to acquire it at the level necessary for advancing on this course. We can help to find suitable materials for obtaining the necessary background.