Monojit Choudhury (Principal Applied Scientist) and Aditi Khandelwal, Kumar Tanmay, Utkarsh Agarwal (research scholars), Microsoft Corporation
– 30 September 2023 and 8 October 2023
A course on practical natural language processing (NLP) was conceived and taught for the benefit of the BTech (Mathematics and Computing) students of IISc, by instructors from the Microsoft Corporation.
The course aimed to provide students with an accelerated understanding of building practical engineering NLP systems and Prompt Engineering using most advanced LLMs. By demonstrating concepts of practical use through widely adopted frameworks like HuggingFace and PyTorch, the course illustrated the end-to-end functioning of language models, with a particular focus on Grammar Correctness Checking Systems. A hands-on approach was adopted to demonstrate the development of these systems and explore various prompting strategies for different large language models, including BingChat (GPT-4), ChatGPT, and PaLM2. Additionally, the course provided a brief overview of how to leverage these developed models in user-facing applications like ChatBots. Certificates were awarded to all the students who successfully completed the course requirements.