Advanced Semantic Processing

Updated in May 2025. This course now features Coursera Coach! A smarter way to learn with interactive, real-time conversations that help you test your knowledge, challenge assumptions, and deepen your understanding as you progress through the course. Start your journey into advanced semantic processing with an introduction to fundamental concepts such as entities, arity, and reification. Learn about schemas and semantic associations, understanding how these elements form the backbone of semantic processing. The course covers important concepts like terms, the principle of composition, and tools like WordNet and word sense disambiguation, culminating in a case study using the Lesk algorithm. Move forward with an in-depth exploration of distributional semantics, delving into occurrence matrices and co-occurrence matrices to understand semantic relationships. Develop proficiency in creating and interpreting word vectors and grasp the importance of distance metrics. This section equips you with the skills needed to handle large sets of textual data, extracting meaningful semantic information. Finally, tackle advanced topics such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Word2vec, applying these techniques to real-world scenarios through multiple case studies. By the end, you will have a robust understanding of advanced semantic processing techniques and their applications in NLP. This course is designed for NLP enthusiasts, data scientists, and professionals looking to deepen their knowledge of semantic processing. A basic understanding of NLP and machine learning concepts is recommended.