Prof. Dragomir Radev Teaching Course on NLP Through Coursera

This summer, Prof. Dragomir Radev is teaching two course offerings of his course Introduction to Natural Language Processing through Coursera, the online education platform which aims to provide universal access to the world’s best education.

Prof. Radev is offering the 12-week course twice, with the first session having begun July 4th and the second session set to begin on August 1st. The course provides an introduction to the field of Natural Language Processing. It includes relevant background material in Linguistics, Mathematics, Probabilities, and Computer Science. Some of the topics covered in the class are Text Similarity, Part of Speech Tagging, Parsing, Semantics, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, and Text Summarization. The course makes use of pre-recorded material and includes quizzes, programming assignments in Python, and a final exam. The course syllabus is available here; the course is free and open to the public.

Prof. Radev is a leader in the field of computational linguistics, which leverages techniques from computer science and linguistics and is concerned with the computational aspects of the human language faculty. His research takes place at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, machine learning, bioinformatics, text and data mining, social networks, social media, collective behavior, text generation, information extraction, and artificial intelligence. Additionally, he is co-founder and program chair of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), an annual contest in which high school student teams solve linguistic and natural-language processing problems, and serves as a coach annually for the two United Sttes teams in international competition.

Prof. Radev received his PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 1999 and joined the faculty at Michigan in 2000. He has been recognized at Michigan with a UROP Faculty Recognition Award for Outstanding Research Mentorship in 2004, and with a Faculty Recognition Award from the Rackham Graduate School in 2013. He received the Gosnell Prize for Excellence from the Society for Political Methodology in 2006. In 2011, NACLO was recognized with the Linguistic Society of America’s Linguistics, Language and the Public Award. Radev is a Fellow of ACM and served as Secretary of the Association for Computational Linguistics.