Seminar Title: Natural Language Processing: Understanding and
Generating Human Language
No BY ID_NO
1 CHALACHEW ALEBEL RU0438/14
2 REHOBOTH LEGESSE RT10026/15
3 YOHANIS FELEK RU1726/14
4 YOHANNES YENEAKAL RU1731/14
5 YOSEPH SIMENEH RU1753/14
Submitted to: Mr. Sabit A. (Msc.)
04/26/2025 Bonga, Ethiopia
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Introduction
Background of NLP
Statement of the Problem
Objectives of the Seminar
Scope of the Seminar
Methodology
Applications of NLP
Limitations of NLP
Solutions and Innovations in NLP
Future of NLP
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Introduction
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that
focuses on enabling computers to understand, interpret, analyze, and generate human
language in a way that is both meaningful and useful.
It acts as a bridge between human communication and computer understanding.
NLP allows machines to read text, hear speech, understand meaning, determine intent,
and even respond like a human.
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Background of NLP
Origin:(1950s–60s):
NLP began during the early days of AI when researchers tried to apply grammar
rules to help machines understand language.
Focus: Parsing sentences like “The cat sits on the mat” into parts of speech (noun,
verb, etc.).
Early Approach: Rule-Based Systems:
These systems used manually written grammar rules to process language.
Example: A chatbot that only replies correctly if you use exact words it was
programmed to recognize (e.g., “Hello” → “Hi! How can I help you?”).
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Background of NLP…,
1990s: Statistical methods like HMMs and SVMs improved accuracy.
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) – Used for Speech Recognition
• It guesses the hidden structure behind a sentence — like the parts of speech (noun,
verb, etc.) — using probabilities
Support Vector Machines (SVMs) – Used for Text Classification.
• SVM finds a boundary that separates different categories (e.g., apples and oranges)
based on features like weight and color intensity.
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Background of NLP…,
Recent:
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)
• RNNs are a type of neural network designed to handle sequential data.
• For example, after processing "I am," the network has some understanding of context to help
predict the next word "going.“
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs)
• LSTMs are able to "remember" information for longer periods, making them better at
handling sequences with long-range dependencies
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Background of NLP…,
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a
transformer-based model designed to understand the context of words in a
sentence by considering the entire sentence (both left and right context).
example
Sentence: "He went to the park to watch the bass swim in the lake."
BERT uses the surrounding words ("watch," "swim," and "lake") to understand
that "bass" refers to a type of fish, not the musical instrument
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Background of NLP…,
GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer is another transformer-based model,
but unlike BERT, GPT is designed for text generation. It predicts the next word in
a sentence given the context of all previous words.
Example:-
• Prompt: "Once upon a time, in a faraway land..."
• Generated Continuation: "there was a small village by the sea, where everyone
was kind and lived peacefully
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Statement of the Problem
Language Ambiguity :Words often have multiple meanings.
Data Bias & Ethical Concerns: Models trained on biased data can produce
discriminatory or unfair outputs.
Computational Complexity :Training large models like GPT takes massive
computing power.
Real-World Generalization: Models trained on one domain (like news articles)
may fail on another (like medical texts)
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Objectives of the Seminar
General Objective
The primary objective of this seminar is to provide participants with a thorough
understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP), including its evolution,
methodologies, applications, challenges, and future trends
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Cont…,
Specific Objectives
To explore the evolution of NLP
To understand core NLP methodologies
To assess real-world NLP applications
To identify key challenges in NLP
To examine future trends in NLP research
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Scope of the Seminar
This seminar covers key aspects of NLP, including its evolution from rule-based
models to deep learning (RNNs, LSTMs, BERT, GPT), core techniques like
tokenization and sentiment analysis, real-world applications in healthcare, finance, and
more.
It also addresses challenges such as data bias, multilingual limitations, and explores
solutions like bias mitigation, efficiency improvements, and future trends in ethical AI
and communication.
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Methodology
Natural Language Processing (NLP) uses key methodologies to help machines
understand and generate human language. such as
Tokenization: Splits text into smaller units called tokens (words, subwords, or
characters) for easier analysis.
Example:"Natural Language Processing" → ["Natural", "Language", "Processing"]
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Cont….
Lemmatization: reduces words to their meaningful base form using grammar rules.
Example: "running" → "run", "better" → "good“.
Parsing: analyses sentence structure to identify grammatical roles and relationships
between words.
Example: "The cat sat on the mat." → Subject: "cat", Verb: "sat", Object: "mat“.
Sentiment Analysis: determines the emotional tone of a text as positive, negative, or
neutral.
Example: "This product is amazing!" → Positive sentiment
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Applications of NLP
Customer Support
Healthcare e.g. IBM Watson Health
Finance
E-commerce
Cybersecurity
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Limitations of NLP
Poor Generalization: Struggle to adapt to new domains without retraining.
Latency Issues: Delays in real-time responses due to model size and
complexity.
Multilingual Gaps: Poor support for low-resource languages, limiting global
inclusivity.
Lack of Explainability: AI "black boxes" reduce trust in sensitive fields
(health, finance, law).
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Solutions and Innovations in NLP
Bias Mitigation: Using debiasing algorithms & diverse datasets to create fair
and ethical models.
Multilingual Support: Leveraging models like mBERT & transfer learning to
support low-resource languages.
Efficiency Improvements: Lightweight models (e.g., DistilBERT), pruning,
and hardware optimization for faster, cheaper NLP
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Future of NLP
Low-Resource Language Support: Inclusive tools for underrepresented
languages.
Explainable AI: Transparent and trustworthy NLP models.
Few-/Zero-Shot Learning: Smarter models with less training data.
Conversational AI: More natural, human-like interactions.
Ethical AI: Fair, unbiased, and responsible NLP systems.
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Conclusion
NLP has transformed how machines understand human language, impacting
industries like healthcare, finance, and customer service. Advances in deep
learning models (RNNs, LSTMs, BERT, GPT) have enhanced language
comprehension. Despite challenges like ambiguity, bias, and high
computational needs, the future of NLP lies in overcoming these issues through
multilingual processing, ethical AI, and improved efficiency.
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