Natural Language Processing

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Dr Paul Nulty
• Assessment: a programming portfolio (60%) and online quiz (40%)

Due to the explosive growth of digital information in recent years, modern natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR) systems such as search engines have become more and more important in almost everyone's work and life. NLP and IR research and development is one of the hottest research areas in academia as well as industry, with applications of text analysis and computational linguistics widespread across domains from natural language interfaces and machine translation to digital humanities and computational social science. 

In this module we introduce modern NLP and IR concepts and techniques, from basic linguistic foundations to the theoretical and engineering advances that form the basis of the well-known large language models of today. Both theoretical and practical aspects of NLP and IR systems will be presented and the most recent issues in the field of NLP and IR will be discussed, with an emphasis on hands-on development using the latest NLP libraries. 

Indicative syllabus

• Introduction to basic concepts
• Text pre-processing techniques
• Retrieval models
• Indexing and searching algorithms
• Performance evaluation
• Text classification/clustering
• Language modelling
• Advanced topics in NLP and IR

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• understand facts, concepts and principals of NLP and IR systems
• recognise and discuss criteria and specifications appropriate to specific problems and plan strategies for their solution
• discuss and explain the extent to which an NLP or IR system meets the criteria defined for its current and future development
• deploy appropriate practices and tools for the specification, design, implementation and evaluation of NLP and IR systems.