Introduction to Natural Language Processing

How do computers understand language? It seems impossible that zeroes and ones could ever add up to words that humans can understand, but machine language has come a long way in the past few years. Let us take you behind the code to explain how machines simulate language comprehension, and why it’s a far more complicated problem than “bonjour = hello”. This talk is aimed at an audience who is not necessarily familiar with computers or language comprehension, but would like a primer to the field, and what it can realistically do. We will explain natural language processing from the perspective of machines that cannot understand words, but capture semantic meaning by processing data.

This session will take place on:

Tuesday, April 16th – 1:00pm – 4:00pm (Atlantic time)

You do need to have a laptop with a Mac, Linux or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc) on which you have administrative privileges, as you will need to pre-load specific software packages.

Participants must register using their institutional / organizational email address (not a personal email, ie. gmail)

Instructions for how to join will be sent out one day prior to the start of the event.