Elective:NaturalLanguageProcessingAndMachineLearning.tex

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

This course gives a tour of data-intensive natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Students study automated processing of the big data source that is social media, from an artificial intelligence perspective, using statistical machine learning (ML). The course introduces the field, and demonstrate multiple complete practical examples in various real-world tasks. Covering basic structures and theory, the course leaves participants with knowledge of how to match machine learning tool with problem in the context of language processing. The intricacies and nuances involved in social media text are also covered, being a significantly different and more interesting text type than the prior research on newswire. Topics covered include entity recognition, sentiment analysis, discriminative and structured learning, and processing for indexing and retrieval. The machine learning skills required to complete the course are included (i.e. types of learner, representations, and evaluation). The later parts of the course give both theory and practical tools for machine learning.