Hey Siri, Get to Know NYU’s Natural Language Processing Class

From voice-activated personal assistants to automatic transcription services, natural language processing is already a fixture in our daily lives. Therefore, students in the NYU Shanghai NLP course apply cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to improve their computer’s communication abilities. The goal is simple: help the computer process information as a person does. However, the process is anything but. For example, it requires foundational knowledge in statistics, machine learning, and probability.

“We’ve learned a lot about data processing, model building, and different types of state-of-the-art architectures and the mathematical theories behind them. Those have really helped me in my journey along the road of AI learning and developing,” reflects Kyrie Tang Sheng, who prefers to go by Tang. He’s an NYU Shanghai Computer Science major who took Professor Tam’s course and conducted research with him this past summer. “It is an advanced course and a hard topic. So you really need to commit your time and energy to it. But it is great fun, too. And Professor Tam is smart, patient, warm-hearted, and open-minded.”

Professor Tam, who previously worked on Microsoft’s virtual assistant, Cortana, first became interested in natural language processing as a master’s student in Hong Kong. “Creating a conversational interface for computers to communicate with humans seemed like such a cool thing. It was like a scene from a sci-fi movie,” he reflects. Today, he loves witnessing his students develop that same passion.

At the end of each semester, the class completes final group projects to flex their programming muscles. For example, Tang and his classmates built a hip-hop freestyle generator. Their model takes in key words and then creates freestyle lyrics. In the past one pair of students wrote a natural language processing model to understand the content of pictures and generate memes. Another created a program to convert modern Chinese into the dialect used during the Tang dynasty—“like converting modern English into Shakespeare,” explains Professor Tam.