Fundamentals of Natural Language Processing in Python

This workshop will provide participants with the fundamentals of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python.

The workshop will take place at Science Park 402, 1098 XH Amsterdam. Please note that lunch and drinks at the end of the workshop are included.

The lessons in this workshop will teach the fundamentals of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python. They will equip you with the foundational skills and knowledge needed to carry over text-based research projects. The lessons are designed with researchers in the Humanities and Social Sciences in mind, but are also applicable to other fields of research.

On the first day we will dive into text preprocessing and word embeddings while exploring semantic shifts in various words over multiple decades. The second day begins with an introduction to transformers, and we will work on classification and named entity recognition with the BERT model. In the afternoon, we willl cover large language language models, and you will learn how to build your own agents.

The workshop is based on the teaching style of the Carpentries, and learners will follow along while the instructors write the code on screen. More information can be found on the workshop website (will be activated once registration is live).

Ticket Prices

Ticket prices are as follows:

• For participants affiliated with Dutch research institutions: €225.00
• For participants from industry: €675.00

Prerequisites

The workshop is aimed at PhD candidates, postdocs, (assistant-)professors and other researchers and also open for research support staff and research software engineers. We offer tickets for researchers who are affiliated with Dutch research institutions. We do not accept registrations by Master students.

The participant should:

• be familiar with Python
• be comfortable working in Jupyter

Early Bird Discount

Register within the first week of open registration and receive a 25% discount on your participation fee. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to secure your spot at a reduced price!

Group Discount

Bring your team along and benefit from our group discount. Groups of five or more participants are eligible for a 25% discount. For more details and to register your group, please email us at training@esciencecenter.nl.

Cancellation

If you won’t be able to attend, please cancel your registration (by following instructions here) so that we can offer your seat to someone on the waiting list.

Syllabus

Introduction

• What is NLP?
• Core applications
• NLP tasks
• Natural vs Artificial Language

From text to vectors

• Formulate the problem: semantic shift
• Download and inspect the data
• Prepare data to be ingested by the model (preprocessing)
• Tracing semantic shifts with word embeddings
• Train the Word2Vec model
• Load the embeddings and inspect them

BERT and Transformers

• Transformers
• BERT
• BERT Architecture
• BERT as a Language Model
• BERT for Text Classification
• Understanding BERT Architecture
• BERT for Token Classification

Large Language Models

• What are Large Language Models?
• Building a chatbot
• Retrieval Augmented Generation - Build a RAG