Transfer Learning for NLP and its Application to African Languages

Dr. Paul Azunre, author of the just-published "Transfer Learning for NLP" by Manning Publications (https://www.manning.com/books/transfer-learning-for-natural-language-processing) and co-founder of Ghana NLP (http://ghananlp.org/), will share excerpts from his book with examples on adapting models to African languages.

Summary:
This talk is about how to build custom NLP models quickly with limited datasets by using transfer learning to adapt pretrained machine learning models. Transfer Learning has driven many recent improvements in NLP applications such as machine translation, business analytics, and natural language generation. Drawing on his book, "Transfer Learning for Natural Language Processing" Paul Azunre discusses recent advances in this exciting field. The talk will provide an overview of these advances and discuss the author's work in their real-world application to machine translation and automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Ghanaian and other African languages.

Bio:
Paul Azunre holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and has served as a Principal Investigator on several DARPA research programs. He founded Algorine Inc., a Research Lab dedicated to advancing AI/ML and identifying scenarios where they can have a significant social impact. Paul also co-founded Ghana NLP, an open source initiative focused on using NLP and Transfer Learning with Ghanaian and other low-resource languages. He also serves as Director of Research at Dun & Bradstreet, a company helping businesses manage supply chain risk and other business analytics challenges. He is the author of the recently published book "Transfer Learning for NLP" by Manning Publications.

https://www.manning.com/books/transfer-learning-for-natural-language-processing

https://www.amazon.com/Transfer-Learning-Natural-Language-Processing-ebook/dp/B09B7VBYV9