Course Information#

UBC Master of Data Science program, 2023-24

Instructor: Varada Kolhatkar

Learning outcomes#

From this lecture, students are expected to be able to:

  • Explain relevance of NLP and some goals of natural language processing (NLP).

  • Explain difficulties associated with NLP.

  • Name a few applications of natural language processing.

Map of ML courses in MDS#

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?#

  • What should a search engine return when asked the following question?

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?#

How often do you search everyday?#

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?#

Everyday NLP applications#

NLP in news#

Often you’ll NLP in news. Some examples:

Why is NLP hard?#

  • Language is complex and subtle.

  • Language is ambiguous at different levels.

  • Language understanding involves common-sense knowledge and real-world reasoning.

  • All the problems related to representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence arise in this domain.

Example: Lexical ambiguity#



Example: Referential ambiguity#



Ambiguous news headlines#

PROSTITUTES APPEAL TO POPE

  • appeal to means make a serious or urgent request or be attractive or interesting?

KICKING BABY CONSIDERED TO BE HEALTHY

  • kicking is used as an adjective or a verb?

MILK DRINKERS ARE TURNING TO POWDER

  • turning means becoming or take up?





High-level goals of this course#

  • Learn and apply new ML algorithms and methods with the theme of NLP applications.

  • Prepare you a bit for employment in the NLP area.

  • Have fun!





Course roadmap#

Week 1#

  • Markov models

Applications of Markov models#

Week 2#

  • Hidden Markov models

Week 3#

  • Topic modeling (Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA))

    • Suppose given a large collection of documents, you are asked to

      • Infer different topics in the documents

      • Pull all documents about a certain topic

  • Introduction to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)

Week 4#

  • Transformers

Source

ASIDE: Neural Storyteller#

We were barely able to catch the breeze at the beach , and it felt as if someone stepped out of my mind . She was in love with him for the first time in months , so she had no intention of escaping . The sun had risen from the ocean , making her feel more alive than normal . She 's beautiful , but the truth is that I do n't know what to do ...

Source

Tools we will be using in this class#

Make sure to set up the environment using the course environment file.

That’s all about course information!