Modern NLP: Introduction

In course

Description

This lecture introduces the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its applications in enabling human-machine collaboration, search engines, dialogue agents, text generation, and more. The instructor, Antoine Bosselut, discusses the challenges of NLP, such as ambiguity in language, and the advancements in neural language models. The lecture covers the basics of NLP, including language models, learning algorithms, and the course goals. It also outlines the building blocks and topics that will be covered throughout the course, emphasizing the importance of understanding modern approaches and deploying them in practical scenarios.

Official source

https://mediaspace.epfl.ch/media/0_4tzspf7x

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Related concepts (60)

History of natural language processing

The history of natural language processing describes the advances of natural language processing (Outline of natural language processing). There is some overlap with the history of machine translation, the history of speech recognition, and the history of artificial intelligence. The history of machine translation dates back to the seventeenth century, when philosophers such as Leibniz and Descartes put forward proposals for codes which would relate words between languages.

Language model

A language model is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. Large language models, as their most advanced form, are a combination of feedforward neural networks and transformers. They have superseded recurrent neural network-based models, which had previously superseded the pure statistical models, such as word n-gram language model.

Natural language processing

Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics and computer science. It is primarily concerned with processing natural language datasets, such as text corpora or speech corpora, using either rule-based or probabilistic (i.e. statistical and, most recently, neural network-based) machine learning approaches. The goal is a computer capable of "understanding" the contents of documents, including the contextual nuances of the language within them.

Controlled natural language

Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of natural languages that are obtained by restricting the grammar and vocabulary in order to reduce or eliminate ambiguity and complexity. Traditionally, controlled languages fall into two major types: those that improve readability for human readers (e.g. non-native speakers), and those that enable reliable automatic semantic analysis of the language.

Neural machine translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) is an approach to machine translation that uses an artificial neural network to predict the likelihood of a sequence of words, typically modeling entire sentences in a single integrated model. They require only a fraction of the memory needed by traditional statistical machine translation (SMT) models. Furthermore, unlike conventional translation systems, all parts of the neural translation model are trained jointly (end-to-end) to maximize the translation performance.