Teaching NLP in the AI Era: Experiences from the University of Latvia

AbstractFrom being a niche technology with practical applications in translation and speech recognition, NLP is now underpinning the AI era through LLMs, promising a universal economic impact in the future. Although transitioning to the AI era is hyped by BigTech companies, practical adoption of the LLM capabilities for economically impactful tasks and processes goes via education of specialists capable to apply it properly. Human-in-the-loop, accuracy measurement, fine-tuning, on-premises processing of sensitive data have become essential skills for applying NLP. This short paper introduces two language technology modules developed and piloted at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Latvia.