Generative AI stands at the cutting edge of today's artificial intelligence landscape, ushering in a new paradigm where machines understand intricate data patterns and autonomously produce them. This course provides a comprehensive exploration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU), emphasizing modern advancements such as Generative AI and transformer architectures. Students will delve into foundational language concepts, sequence modeling, and word representations while also addressing practical applications like machine translation and chatbot development. The course will cover pre-training techniques, fine-tuning methods, and prompt engineering, along with discussions on ethics, bias, fairness, and privacy in AI. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to develop, evaluate, and deploy NLP models across various languages and modalities.

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Apply foundational NLP techniques, including syntax, semantics, and discourse analysis, to process and analyze textual data. 

• Develop and implement advanced language models using architectures like Transformers and understand their underlying mechanisms. 

• Utilize pre-trained models and employ strategies like instruction tuning and prompt engineering to enhance model performance.

• Critically assess NLP systems for ethical issues, proposing solutions to mitigate bias and ensure fairness and privacy.

Textbooks

• Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin, 3rd edition

• Hands-on Large Language Models by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst

Our special thanks to Professors Roni Rosenfeld, Kilian Weinberger, Andrew Ng, Sarmad Hussain, Dan Jurafsky, James H. Martin, Christopher Manning, and Victor Levrenko, whose Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Speech Processing courses inspired the contents of several lectures in this series. 

We would also like to express our gratitude towards Kalid Azad (Better Explained), Joshua Starmer (StatQuest), and Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown), as their amazing educational videos motivated and simplified several complex explanations in this course.