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