Università Roma Tre

Teaching target

The course "Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Applied to Language" is part of the Cognitive Science of Communication and Action training activities.
The lab aims to provide students with a solid theoretical foundation of AI applied to language and a well-established ability to interact with Large Language Models (LLMs) through the most advanced prompt engineering techniques.
These objectives are achieved through two phases.
The first, more theoretical, involves teaching how neural networks work with a particular focus on Transformers, i.e., the architecture used in commonly used language models today such as ChatGPT.
The second, practical phase involves teaching prompt engineering techniques and the student's application, including experimental application, of these techniques in the various scenarios that will be presented.

Expected accomplishments
By the end of the course the student will have understood both theoretically and practically how these models work.

Theoretically he or she will have understood:
- how neural networks are similar to human functioning and how they differ;
- how neural networks and in particular language model neural networks (LLMs) work; and
- What prompt engineering techniques should be used depending on the context and in general how to relate to these models
- How they can be used in society, work, and their socio-economic implications.

Practically, the student will be able to:
- Write the most appropriate prompts for the required case and know how to get the most out of language models
- Understand the limitations of such models and how they can be used in a pipeline to create linguistic automations.
No prior knowledge of code is necessary