Week 8 - Natural Language Processing & Deep Learning

Week: 2025-10-27 to 2025-10-31
Status: “Done”

Week 8 Overview

This week provides a comprehensive deep-dive into Natural Language Processing (NLP), covering linguistic foundations, modern NLP applications, sequence-to-sequence architectures, and evaluation methodologies. From understanding phonetics to implementing machine translation systems, this week bridges theory and practice in NLP.

Key Topics

Linguistic Foundations

  • Core components: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics
  • Understanding how language structure informs NLP design

NLP Applications

  • Search engines and intent recognition
  • Online advertising with NER and relationship extraction
  • Voice assistants and speech recognition
  • Chatbots with NLU/NLG pipelines
  • Machine translation systems
  • Text summarization (extractive & abstractive)

Deep Learning Architectures

  • Seq2seq models with encoder-decoder architecture
  • LSTM deep dive: forget gate, input gate, cell state, output gate
  • Attention mechanism and self-attention
  • Neural Machine Translation (NMT) implementation

Evaluation & Decoding

  • BLEU score (precision-based)
  • ROUGE score (recall-based)
  • F1 score for MT evaluation
  • Beam search decoding
  • Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) sampling

Hands-on Labs

  • Building voicebot and chatbot workflows
  • Implementing LSTM for sequence modeling
  • Creating encoder-decoder with attention
  • Neural machine translation end-to-end
  • Evaluating translation quality with BLEU/ROUGE
  • Implementing beam search and MBR