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COMP4167: NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Please ensure you check the module availability box for each module outline, as not all modules will run in each academic year. Each module description relates to the year indicated in the module availability box, and this may change from year to year, due to, for example: changing staff expertise, disciplinary developments, the requirements of external bodies and partners, and student feedback. Current modules are subject to change in light of the ongoing disruption caused by Covid-19.

Type Open
Level 4
Credits 10
Availability Available in 2023/24
Module Cap None.
Location Durham
Department Computer Science

Prerequisites

  • COMP3547 Deep Learning

Corequisites

  • None

Excluded Combinations of Modules

  • None

Aims

  • Introduce the students to computational linguistics
  • Introduce the students to Language models
  • Gain experience in working with various textual data
  • Gain experience in using advanced techniques to solve natural language tasks such as text parsing, understanding, classification, translation, and generation

Content

  • Text Pre-processing
  • Features Extraction
  • Language Modelling and Neural Language Modelling
  • Neural Word Embedding and their interpretation
  • Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for Language Models
  • Advanced variations of RNNs
  • Sequence to Sequence Architectures
  • Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Classification
  • Transformers and Attention based Models
  • Multitask Learning
  • Natural Language Generation
  • NLP Ethics and Fairness

Learning Outcomes

Subject-specific Knowledge:

  • On completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate:
  • Understanding of the fundamental concepts of Language Models
  • Understanding of the mathematical basis of various deep-learning based language models
  • Understanding of the learning algorithms behind major NLP use cases e.g. Machine Translation, Multi-task Learning, Language Generation, ...
  • Understanding of the embedded bias in popular language models

Subject-specific Skills:

  • On completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate:
  • The ability to conduct independent research in the NLP field
  • The ability to handle textual data and extract representative features
  • The ability to use state-of-the-art NLP techniques and models to solve real-world applications

Key Skills:

  • On completion of the module, students will be able to demonstrate:
  • The ability to design end-to-end solutions for real-world problems with textual input using state-of-the-art NLP techniques
  • The ability to make informative decisions regarding the Deep Learning choices and the word embeddings
  • Awareness of the Language Models and their biases

Modes of Teaching, Learning and Assessment and how these contribute to the learning outcomes of the module

  • Lectures enable the students to learn new material relevant to NLP concepts, word embeddings, language models, as well as their applications.
  • Practical classes enable the students to put into practice learning from lectures and strengthen their understanding through application.
  • Summative assessments assess the application of methods and techniques, and assess the understanding of core concepts.

Teaching Methods and Learning Hours

ActivityNumberFrequencyDurationTotalMonitored
lectures202 per week, unless there is a practical class that week1 hour20 
practical classes22 set within the teaching period of the module1 hour2 
preparation and reading78 
total100 

Summative Assessment

Component: CourseworkComponent Weighting: 100%
ElementLength / DurationElement WeightingResit Opportunity
Summative Assignment100NO

Formative Assessment

Example formative exercises are given during the course.

More information

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