Hey everyone. My name is Anna.
And I'm here to present our new online course about natural language processing.
NLP tasks are everywhere around us;
suggest in search, automatic Gmail replies, machine translation.
But one task which is especially popular today is chatbots or dialogue systems.
It could be a bot that tries to hold the human-like conversation with you.
Or it could be a bot that assists with some particular tasks,
like comparing two vacation packages,
or setting alarms, or answering your questions
about credit in the bank instead of a representative in a call center.
Do you know how this things work?
So what is inside?
Some deep learning magic or a rule-based approach or something else.
Well, you will build your own chatbot in our course project.
But before that, we will cover also
some other interesting tasks like text classification,
name entity recognition, duplicates detection and many more.
Our course is rather advanced.
We expect you're already familiar with
some methods of machine learning and deep learning,
and now you want to apply them to texts.
Our goal is not to stack several black box techniques to build a dialogue monster.
On the opposite, we will see what is inside
each box and cover it with a good amount of mathematics.
So does that thing look familiar to you?
Are you scared with this letter?
Well, you're about to see a lot of this kind of
formulas in the upcoming weeks. So, be prepared.
We will discuss how to represent pieces of text with
sound vectors so that we can compute similarity between vectors.
For example, how do you teach a machine that
leaky faucet and tap is dripping are kind of the same thing.
Personally, I am passionate about NLP.
I'm finishing PhD. on that,
teaching NLP at Yandex School of Data Analysis and
Moscow State University and doing internships and companies from time to time.
I have never done online courses though.
So, I am very excited to have this experience now,
and I will be happy to see you on board.