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COMS 4705: Natural Language Processing

Columbia University, Fall 2025, Section 2

Instructor

John Hewitt
Email: jh5020@columbia.edu

Course Description

Learning from, and learning to generate, natural language is one of the core strategies in modern artificial intelligence. Systems built from the tools learned in this class are increasingly deployed in the world. This section (Section 2) provides a generative models-focused introduction to this field of natural language processing, with the goal of understanding and implementing the foundational ideas beneath state-of-the-art systems.

Topics will include: language modeling, neural network design, text tokenization, web-scale text datasets, machine translation, summarization, accelerators like GPU and TPUs, linguistics and the structure of language, reinforcement learning, and many others.

Schedule

Lectures: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:40 PM – 3:55 PM
Location: TBD

Office Hours

John: TBD

TA Office Hours: TBD