Course detail
Natural Language Processing (in English)
FIT-ZPJaAcad. year: 2025/2026
Foundations of the natural language processing, historical perspective, statistical NLP and modern era dominated by machine learning and, specifically, deep neural networks. Meaning of individual words, lexicology and lexicography, word senses and neural architectures for computing word embeddings, word sense classification and inferrence. Constituency and dependency parsing, syntactic ambiguity, neural dependency parsers. Language modeling and its applications in general architectures. Machine translation, historical perspective on the statistical approach, neural translation and evaluation scores. End-to-end models, attention mechanisms, limits of current seq2seq models. Question answering based on neural models, information extraction components, text understanding challenges, learning by reading and machine comprehension. Text classification and its modern applications, convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. Language-independent representations, non-standard texts from social networks, representing parts of words, subword models. Contextual representations and pretraining for context-dependent language modules. Transformers and self-attention for generative models. Communication agents and natural language generation. Coreference resolution and its interconnection to other text understanding components.
Language of instruction
Number of ECTS credits
Mode of study
Guarantor
Offered to foreign students
Entry knowledge
- Programming in Python.
- Calculus (derivatives),
- Probability theory and statistics,
- Basics of machine learning.
Rules for evaluation and completion of the course
- Mid-term test - up to 9 points
- Individual project - up to 40 points
- Written final exam - up to 51 points
The evaluation includes mid-term test, individual project, and the final exam. The mid-term test does not have a correction option, the final exam has two possible correction runs.
Aims
The students will get acquainted with natural language processing and will understand a range of neural network models that are commonly applied in the field. They will also grasp basics of neural implementations of attention mechanisms and sequence embedding models and how these modular components can be combined to build state of the art NLP systems. They will be able to implement and to evaluate common neural network models for various NLP applications.
Students will improve their programming skills and their knowledge and practical experience with tools for deep learning as well as with general processing of textual data.
Study aids
Prerequisites and corequisites
Basic literature
Recommended reading
(EN)
Elearning
Classification of course in study plans
- Programme IT-MGR-1H Master's
specialization MGH , 0 year of study, winter semester, recommended course
- Programme MIT-EN Master's 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
- Programme MITAI Master's
specialization NSEC , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NNET , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NMAL , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NCPS , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NHPC , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NVER , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NIDE , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NISY , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NEMB , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NSPE , 0 year of study, winter semester, compulsory
specialization NEMB , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NBIO , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NSEN , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NVIZ , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NGRI , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NADE , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NISD , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
specialization NMAT , 0 year of study, winter semester, elective
Type of course unit
Lecture
Teacher / Lecturer
Syllabus
- Motivation and Challenges of Natural Language Processing, Active Topics (in Business or Research), Linguistic Laws, and Project Introduction.
- Probabilities, Calculus of Neural Networks, Language Representation, deriving gradients for Word2Vec
- RNNs, Exploding/Vanishing gradients, Truncated BPTT, bi-RNNs
- Attention, Transformers, architectures such as BERT, LLAMA3, Linear Attention.
- Unsupervised Topic Discovery, Document Representation, Multimodal Representation.
- Large Language Models, In-context learning, Chain-of-thought reasoning.
- Natural Language Generation, Greedy Search, Beam Search, Ancestral Sampling, Top-k Sampling, Nucleus Sampling.
- Instruction Tuning, Policy Optimization.
- Speech-aware Language Models.
- Long-context processing & Applications in Scientific Literature Processing.
- Information Retrieval and Question Answering, BM25, Query Expansion, Relevance Model, DPR, ColBERT, Cross-Encoder.
- Reserved Invited Lecture.
- Poster Session.
Project
Teacher / Lecturer
Syllabus
- Individually assigned project
Elearning