The University of Cyprus's course on Natural Language Processing is part of the Master programmes in Artificial Intelligence 4 Careers in Europe (MAI4CAREU). This course is split up into several lectures and is taught by Demetris Paschalides from the Department of Computer Science. This first lecture provides an Introduction and course overview.

Learning outcomes 

The course begins with an introduction of the instructor, Demetris Paschalides – whose research interest is on the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to address social and ethical challenges. The course also provides the textbook used to accompany the course.

The short introductory lecture gives an overview of:

• Introduction to NLP
• Provides examples of industry and commercial applications, and conversational agents (such as Alexa and Siri)
• ChatGPT and LLMs Revolution
• Text classification 
• Recommendation engines
• The challenges of language interpretation, slang, emojis, and PoS tagging
• Models and tools to tackling issues

Course outline

The Natural Language Processing course is divided into 7 subsections: 

1. Text Pre-processing
2. Language Modeling
3. Text Classification
4. Word Vector Representation
5. Distributed Contextual Embeddings
6. Application of NLP in:
   1. Hate-speech Identification
   2. Fake News Detection
   3. Political Polarization
7. Introduction to Large Language Models