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Preface

Before we start with the first lecture, let's briefly align our expectations and talk about what this course is and what it is not.

This course is ...

  • a practical introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • hands-on: we will learn some important NLP libraries and frameworks
  • collaborative: you are encouraged to contribute to the course content through GitHub
  • driven by real-world use cases
  • a course that will teach you the foundations of NLP and equip you with the knowledge and skills to apply NLP in your domain
  • designed for software engineers and we will focus on the engineering perspective of NLP

This course is not ...

  • a theoretical deep dive into NLP algorithms and models: we rather want to know how we can apply NLP in practice
  • primarily about ChatGPT and GenAI: we will cover these topics, but we rather focus on the foundations of NLP
  • a survey of the latest NLP research: the field is moving fast, and we will rather build a good foundation that will allow you to keep up with the latest developments
  • a course that will teach you how to build NLP models from scratch: we will rather focus on how to apply existing models and frameworks