Introduction: NLP is a Big Deal!
In this week's lecture, we introduced you to the world of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and talked a bit about what NLP is and what it aims to do.
But (as we briefly alluded to) this class is probably not the first place many of you have heard of NLP (even if you didn't quite know it by that name). NLP occupies a fairly prominent role in today's world; these days that's most prominently in the form of LLMs that power tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, but it's worth noting that even before the LLM era, tools like web search (e.g., Google) and social media recommender algorithms were also built on NLP. The point is, NLP is what we might call a big deal. And like all big deals, it tends to get talked about a lot—in popular media, on social media, maybe even among friends and family!
That's why this week, we want to spend a bit of time thinking about how people talk about NLP. We're not going to say that any particular claims currently being debated are true or false, and we're not going to tell you what to believe philosophically. But our hope is to give you the tools to start thinking more critically about the claims you might read about NLP in your day to day life—a skill we'll continue working to reinforce over the coming weeks as you learn more about how these algorithms actually work.
To get you started on this journey, this week's online lesson will consist of an interactive activity. You'll read a blog post that was written about a specific NLP breakthrough, where your prof has thoroughly stripped out all references to the name of the specific algorithm as well as any mentions of specific dates. Your job will be to guess what year the blog post was written, and (optionally) what NLP algorithm it was talking about.
A guessing game? How mysterious!
I do the NYT crossword every day and attend pub trivia night weekly. I think I got this in the bag.
...Can I have some of your confidence?
...I'm glad you're all excited.
Anyhow, just try and have fun—there's no prize for getting it right! (Though, just for fun, we will go over the class's results as a whole in next week's lecture.)
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