Session: NLP 101: Natural Language Processing and The Era of Transformer Models
Machine Learning, AI and NLP have become part of the daily tech vocabulary. Companies use ML techniques to acquire users, drive revenue and increase profits. It seems that ML is everywhere. But what are the types of things you can do with machine learning, in particularly natural language processing?
What exactly is NLP? How does it work? What are transformer models? How does the chatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model work?
If you’re new to the NLP space, and would like to understand more about what is going on under the hood, or the types of things you can use NLP for, come to this talk! We’ll start broad, going over NLP use cases, followed by understanding how some NLP foundational blocks, such as transformers, work. We'll end with looking at a few specific NLP models (including chatGPT!) in more depth.
Bio
Ana-Maria Istrate is a Senior Research Scientist at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where she supports program teams in the Science Initiative. She is interested in NLP, Knowledge Graphs and machine learning applications to the scientific domain, in particular biomedicine. Most recently, she has been working on text-mining algorithms to extract different types of entities from scientific journal articles. In general, she is excited about using tech and machine learning for science. At CZI, she Co-Leads the Women In Tech (WIT) Group. Prior to CZI, she worked at Amazon in software engineering roles. Ana-Maria completed a BS in Mathematical and Computational Science (Applied Math) and an MS in Computer Science (the Artificial Intelligence track), both at Stanford, where she also TA-ed a number of classes. She has been passionate about math and science since she knows herself, and she used to compete in international science competitions, such as International Chemistry Olympiad 'D.I.Mendeleev', the International Earth Science Olympiad and the European Union Science Olympiad.