Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar welcomes CMU-Q teaching professor, computer science, Kemal Oflazer, to speak at the A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture Series.  The A. Nico Habermann Distinguished Lecture Series enables students to engage with prominent faculty and well-known leaders in the field of computer science. The lecture series is named after Professor A. Nico Habermann, head of the computer science department between 1980 and 1988 and Founding Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

Lecture Title: Language Models in Natural Language Processing

Abstract: Language models have been a staple component of systems for natural language processing for about 35 years and have been applied in applications such as spelling correction, speech recognition, and statistical machine translation early on, to name a few. Recently however, there has been a remarkable surge in the capabilities and applications of language models. These modern “large language models”, enabled by advances in deep learning and in hardware technology and by availability of huge amounts of data, have led to rapid implementation many applications ranging from text generation to sentiment analysis, question answering, enhanced machine transation, and many others, some including multiple modalities. Clearly many more applications are in our future.

This lecture will be an accessible presentation for the community, of the basic ideas behind language models and their evolution from the earlier models into the large models currently being used today. It will discuss how changes in language representation about a decade ago led to the use of “semantics” instead of superficial representations and and how large language models are now used as components of many NLP applications.