Course Presentation & Logistics

Natural Language Processing

Master in Information Health Engineering

Jerónimo Arenas-García
January 31, 2024

Department of Signal Theory and Communications

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
 Part I

NLP Introduction

1/20
Motivation I

https://www.domo.com/data- never- sleeps

2/20
Motivation II

Large amounts of unstructured text data are generated every second

 We can no longer use the common approach to understand the text and
this is where NLP comes in

3/20
What is NLP?

AI’s discipline concerned with giving computers the ability to understand

written and spoken human languages in the same manner humans do

Modified from 
4/20
A walk-through of recent developments in NLP

Natural language processing: state of the art, current trends and challenges  5/20
Some NLP applications

Source: IconicTranslation, modified from 

6/20
Some NLP applications

• Spam Filtering
• Sentiment Analysis
• Alert detection
• Automating customer
walkthroughs in support
systems
• ...

Source: Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech). Free demo  7/20

Some NLP applications

Regular
Expressions

POS tagging

INFORMATION
Rule-Based
EXTRACTION
Matching
TECHNIQUES

NER

Topic
Free demo 
Modeling

8/20
Some NLP applications

Free demo  9/20

Some NLP applications

Natural Language Chatbot “Eno”  & “BlenderBot” 

10/20
NLP is booming in the healthcare industry

(a) Multiomics Topic Modeling for Breast Cancer Classification 

(b) Winterlight Labs 
(c) Using Natural Language Processing and Network Analysis to Develop a Conceptual Framework for Medication Therapy
Management Research 
(d) Amazon comprehend medical 
(e) Woebot Health 

11/20
 Part II

Course logistics

12/20
What is this course about?

Basic
Document
Vectorization
Parsing
techniques
Word Corpus NLP pre-
embeddings Acquisition processing

Contex- I.
II.
tualized Text LDA
embeddings
Topic modeling
Vectorization

Evaluation
metrics &
Visualization
NLP

III. Semantic
Transformers III.
Semantic Information
Architecture Transformers
Analysis Retrieval

Transfer Semantic
Learning Graphs
Graph
Hugging Face visualization
& Analysis
13/20
Technologies

14/20
Instructor

• Jerónimo Arenas García

 Email: [email protected]
 Office: 4.2.C06 (Leganés)
 Tutor Hours: Wednesday 19:30 – 20:30 (request by email)

Special thanks to Lorena Calvo Bartolomé and Jesús Cid Sueiro that
have both contributed to the teaching materials of this course.

15/20
Methodology

• Mixed theory + practical sessions

• Personal work
• Intensive use of Python Notebooks
• Lab exercises will be proposed during each block
• Writing quiz at the end blocks 2 and 4

16/20
Assessment (Continuous evaluation)

1. Lab exercises (20% total)

• Notebooks should be handed before the next Tuesday, at 23.59.
• Proposed exercises will be reviewed based on methodological correctness
and code quality.
• 5 Assignments will be proposed, keeping best 4 grades.

2. Written tests (15% each, 30% total)

• March 13: Blocks I – III
• May 8: Block IV

3. Kaggle (10%)
• Apr 3: Proposal
• Apr 17: Submission deadline

4. Final project (40%)

• Feb 21: Proposal
• May 13: Deadline (report + code)

17/20
Assessment. June Call

Blocks 1, 2 and 3 grades will be discarded, and a new grade (60%) will be
based on the performance in a practical exam to be carried out in the lab,
and solved in Google Colab. The exam may include some questions about
theoretical concepts.
In addition to the previous practical exam, students will be able to hand in a
new final project (40%).
They can opt for just taking the exam, carrying out a new project, or both.
Any existing grade will be replaced by that achieved in the new
assessmnent items taken during the May call.

18/20
Final Project

Goals:

• To work on a real application scenario involving NLP

• To design experiments/assess results to validate or reject hypotheses
• To use visualization tools
• Prepare a report, introducing the used models/algorithms, presenting
the achieved results, analyzing these results and drawing conclusions

Rules:

• Students will work in teams and hand in their code and a short report

Assessment (tentative):

• Methodology: 2 points
• Report Quality + Visualization: 1,5 points
• Code: 0,5 points

In any case, specific conditions will be published together with the final
project statement.

19/20
Information Resources

• Notebooks provided for the lessons

• Other resources as published in the course description
• Plenty of high-quality material available on the web

20/20