ATNLP: Course Materials
This page contains links to each week of course content. At 7pm on the Friday before the week starts, the page for the following week will appear. The weekly pages will contain all the necessary instructions and information about the week and the course content: readings, slides for the lectures, tutorials, labs or assignments released.
Lecture Recordings
All lecture recordings should be accessed via Learn; you will need to log in using your EASE account. (Learn provides you with access to any lecture recordings available for this course. You will need to select the "lecture recording" link once, before you can access any direct links to a lecture recording.)
Schedule
We divided the topics into:
Applications
Core topics
Insight and Linguistics
Safety and Ethics
Guest Lectures
There might still be changes in the schedule for weeks that are currently in the future.
With the following overall schedule of topics which we consider important to achieving the goals of the course:
- Week 1: Introduction,
machine translation, and
summarisation. - Week 2:
Question answering,
synthetic data. - Week 3:
Evaluation,
parameter-efficient finetuning. - Week 4:
Distillation,
long-context modelling. - Week 5:
Reasoning,
retrieval augmented generation. - Week 6:
Mechanistic interpretability,
LLMs as formal machines. - Week 7:
Syntax and parsing,
safety and security. - Week 8:
Ethics,
Multilingual LLMs. - Week 9:
Multimodal models 1 and 2. - Week 10:
Agents 1 and 2, retrospective and exam prep
And weekly guest lectures by leading experts to give an insight into the breadth of the field:
Guest Lectures:
- Week 2: John Quinn: LLMs and speech models in Uganda
- Week 3: Edoardo Ponti: Dynamic Sparsity in NLP: from Sparse Mixtures of Experts to Sparse Attention
- Week 4: Ivan Titov
- Week 6: Nikolay Malkin: Diffusion models for NLP
- Week 7: Pasquale Minervini: Explainability
- Week 8: Zee Talat: Bias
- Week 8: Emily Allaway: Fact Checking
- Week 9: Jeff Dalton
Exam Guide
An exam guide will be added closer to the exam.