Title: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing
Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) has made tremendous progress in recent years, finding useful application in many fields and establishing itself as one of the most successful areas of AI. In this lecture, we provide an introduction to NLP suitable for STEM students and early entrants to the field. We begin with an overview of NLP and its main tasks; we then move on to describe document vectors and word embeddings; and we conclude with an accessible presentation of deep NLP models, including transformers, BERT and GPT. We hope to whet the audience’s appetite for more.
Prof. Massimo Picardi
Head of Discipline, Signal Processing and Analytics,
School of Electrical and Data Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney – Australia.
Massimo Piccardi is an active researcher in natural language processing and a professor with the Faculty of Engineering and IT at University of Technology Sydney (UTS). At UTS, he serves as Head of Discipline, SEDE Signal Processing and Analytics, and as program leader for Big Data Analytics in the Global Big Data Technologies Centre (GBDTC). Massimo has published over 200 papers in his career and has received funding for a range of research projects in computer vision and NLP. He is also a senior member of the IEEE, a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and an editorial board member for journals IEEE Transactions on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine.