AI-related technologies lie at the foundation of our vision for the future here at A Data Pro. Natural language processing, neural networks and deep learning have all been in the pipeline for some time now. People at the company are used to hearing about building ontologies, RDF frameworks and the semantic web from ditzy developers and cookie professors at least twice weekly. But what does that mean with regard to our day to day operations? Are we gonna start using Siri and Cortana or perhaps IBM’s Watson as advisors on important matters in the foreseeable future?? Well not quite.
A Bulgarian bloke, one of the foremost experts on the topic is soon to deliver an introductory module to natural language processing on the popular Coursera platform. A great course that would shed some light on the technologies currently being developed inhouse.
Some of the topics covered in the class are Text Similarity, Part of Speech Tagging, Parsing, Semantics, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, and Text Summarization.
A distinguished professor in artificial intelligence and NLP in both Columbia University in New York and the University of Michigan, Dragomir Radev has worked for IBM Research and holds several patents for the technology that powers its Watson cognitive system. He is the founder of the Linguistic Society of America and has served as the coach and led the US national team in the International Linguistics Olympiad to several gold medals.
Professor Radev’s course is unique in that caters to different audiences within our firm and offers an invaluable opportunity for novices to get acquainted with NLP.
…Somebody who has programming experience but has never programmed anything related to natural language processing would be able to build much better, more robust and more useful systems. A linguist on the other hand who knows about language would find it interesting to learn about the different algorithms that are used to actually translate those linguistic theories and insights into products and tools that people can use.
The course start date is yet to be announced but while waiting why not have a look at the Deep Learning course offered by Richard Socher at Stanford University.
