Course detail

Natural Language Processing (in English)

FIT-ZPJaAcad. year: 2025/2026

Foundations of the natural language processing, historical perspective, statistical NLP and modern era dominated by machine learning and, specifically, deep neural networks. Meaning of individual words, lexicology and lexicography, word senses and neural architectures for computing word embeddings, word sense classification and inferrence. Constituency and dependency parsing, syntactic ambiguity, neural dependency parsers. Language modeling and its applications in general architectures. Machine translation, historical perspective on the statistical approach, neural translation and evaluation scores. End-to-end models, attention mechanisms, limits of current seq2seq models. Question answering based on neural models, information extraction components, text understanding challenges, learning by reading and machine comprehension. Text classification and its modern applications, convolutional neural networks for sentence classification. Language-independent representations, non-standard texts from social networks, representing parts of words, subword models. Contextual representations and pretraining for context-dependent language modules. Transformers and self-attention for generative models. Communication agents and natural language generation. Coreference resolution and its interconnection to other text understanding components.

Language of instruction

English

Number of ECTS credits

Mode of study

Not applicable.

Guarantor

doc. RNDr. Pavel Smrž, Ph.D.

Department

Department of Computer Graphics and Multimedia (UPGM)

Offered to foreign students

Of all faculties

Entry knowledge

Knowledge of Python programming and fundamental elements of calculus.

Rules for evaluation and completion of the course

Mid-term test - up to 9 points
Individual project - up to 40 points
Written final exam - up to 51 points

The evaluation includes mid-term test, individual project, and the final exam. The mid-term test does not have a correction option, the final exam has two possible correction runs.

Aims

To understand natural language processing and to learn how to apply modern machine learning methods in this field. To get acquainted with advanced deep learning architectures that proved to be successful in various NLP tasks. To

understand the use of neural networks for sequential language modelling, to understand their use as conditional language models for transduction tasks, and to approaches employing these techniques in combination with other mechanisms for advanced applications.

The students will get acquainted with natural language processing and will understand a range of neural network models that are commonly applied in the field. They will also grasp basics of neural implementations of attention mechanisms and sequence embedding models and how these modular components can be combined to build state of the art NLP systems. They will be able to implement and to evaluate common neural network models for various NLP applications.
Students will improve their programming skills and their knowledge and practical experience with tools for deep learning as well as with general processing of textual data.

Study aids

Not applicable.

Prerequisites and corequisites

Not applicable.

Basic literature

Not applicable.

Type of course unit

Lecture

26 hod., optionally

Teacher / Lecturer

Ing. Martin Fajčík, Ph.D.
Ing. Martin Dočekal
Santosh Kesiraju, Ph.D.

Syllabus

Introduction, history of NLP, and modern approaches based on deep learning
Word senses and word vector
Dependency parsing
Language models
Machine translation
Seq2seq models and attention
Question answering
Convolutional neural networks for sentence classification
Information from parts of words: Subword models
Modeling contexts of use: Contextual representations and pretraining
Transformers and self-attention for generative models
Natural language generation
Coreference resolution

Project

26 hod., compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

doc. RNDr. Pavel Smrž, Ph.D.

Syllabus

Individually assigned project

VUT

Faculties

University Institutes

Parts

Natural Language Processing (in English)

Type of course unit