Oxford, United Kingdom

Advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Natural Language Processing

Through predictive text, translation tools, and smart devices natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly a part of our day-to-day lives, and in large language models like Chat-GPT we see the enormous future potential of this exciting area of research. This advanced course examines the theoretical concepts of NLP and its current and potential future application in diverse domains.

The course begins with an introduction to attention mechanisms, examining self-attention, transformers, and byte pair encoding, before turning to large language models (LLMs) and natural language generation, exploring how they use prompting and reinforcement learning with human feedback. You will look closely at the varied applications of NLP and LLMs in particular, such as question answering, translation, and code generation. In the final part of the course you will discover how language and vision can interact in applications such as video captioning or text to image generation, before looking to the future of NLP research and considering the limitations, biases, ethical concerns, and potential misuses of NLP.

This intensive course offers students theoretical understanding and practical experience in a range of natural language processing concepts and techniques, offering career skills as well as excellent foundations for future research.

Target group

This course would suit STEM students with intermediate level experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing concepts and techniques, including those undertaking, or looking ahead to, graduate level study or research.

Specifically, students on this course must have experience of the following topics:
- Knowledge of the deep learning libraries.
- Understanding of deep learning, recurrent neural networks, GRU, and LSTMs.
- Strong background in optimization and probability.
- Familiarity with the Python programming language.

Course aim

By the end of this course, you will:
- Be able to demonstrate understanding of the algorithms and methods used to process textual data.
- Understand the functionality of large language models and their training through finetuning, low-rank adaptation, and quantized low-rank adaptation.
- Demonstrate understanding of the practical applications of natural language processing.
- Be able to discuss the potential limitations, biases, ethical concerns, and misuses of NLP.

Credits info

7.5 EC
LMH Summer Programmes are designed to be eligible for credit, and we recommend the award of 7.5 ECTS / 4 US / 15 CATS for this course.

Fee info

GBP 3980: This includes:
- All tuition, including lectures, seminars, and tutorials.
- Assessment, transcript of academic performance, and certificate.
- A co-curricular programme of skills workshops and guest speakers.
- Access to the Lady Margaret Hall College Library.
- Bed & Breakfast accommodation throughout your programme.
- Lunch and dinner in the College Dining Hall Monday to Friday.
- A full Social & Cultural Programme, including two excursions to other English cities per three-week programme session.
- A high-quality printed class photograph.
- Formal Graduation banquet.