Department of Electronic Engineering, organized 0.5 CPD Webinar on Natural Language Processing - An Introduction

The Department of Electronic Engineering organized a CPD Webinar on “Natural Language Processing-An Introduction” on December 26th, 2020. The resource person of this CPD Webinar was Engr. Khuhed Memon, Assistant Professor Department of Electronic Engineering, MUET, and organizers of the Webinar were Dr. Attiya Baqai, Associate Professor Department of Electronic Engineering, MUET and Engr. Shoaib Hassan Khaskheli (CPD Coordinator, ES), Instrumentation Engineer Department of Electronic Engineering, MUET and Mr. Haq Nawaz (IT Dept). The Webinar was conducted online via MS Teams. More than 120 participants shown their interest to attend the webinar, among them many attendees were from various organizations and universities such as Hamdard University Karachi, DUET Karachi, COMSATS University Islamabad Abbottabad Campus, Sindh University Jamshoro, MUET Jamshoro Campus, MUET SZAB Khairpur Campus, BBSUTSD Khairpur Mirs, QUEST NawabShah, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, Saltec Powerlink, and K-Electric Karachi. A large number of students and faculty from various departments such as Electronics, Telecommunication, Software, Computer System, Information Technology, Electrical, Mining and Mechatronics Engineering attended the webinar.

The Webinar started with the name of Allah. Engr. Shoaib Hassan recited few verses from Holy Quran. Dr. Attiya Baqai welcomed the participants while appreciating their regular participation in the webinar series arranged by Department of Electronic Engineering.  She acknowledged the resource person and her organizing team members for their volunteer services and assistance for the webinar. She also thanked Prof. Dr. Arbab Nighat, Chairperson Department of Electronic Engineering for her support and facilitation. She then invited her for the welcome speech as guest of honor of the webinar.

The Chairperson, Department of Electronic Engineering Prof. Dr. Arbab Nighat appreciated the passion of the attendees for learning Natural Language Processing. She also encouraged the students to continue participating in such type of events. She also appreciated the efforts of organizers Dr. Attiya Baqai, and Engr. Shoaib Hassan Khaskheli and thanked Engr. Khuhed Memon for coming up with such a topic related to the field of Artificial intelligence and instilling awareness amongst students for the latest trends of technology and their utilization in practical scenarios.

Dr. Attiya Baqai handed over the mic to Engr. Khuhed Memon who then started with the introduction and applications of NLP along with Python, further he discussed about the Integrated Development Environment such as PyCharm IDE and various Toolkits such as Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), platforms and libraries like TensorFlow and Keras for Machine Learning and their utilization in natural Language processing.  He also elaborated the NLP workflow by explaining each step of processing from problem statement, dataset acquisition, data cleaning, model training to model deployment. He further demonstrated the concepts by running the demos for two use cases of movie review and depression detection.

At the end of the Webinar there was a question and answer session. An online feedback form about the Webinar was also asked to be filled by the attendees whose statistics demonstrate the success and effectiveness of the Webinar. The webinar ended with vote of thanks to all the participants.

Report compiled by:                                                                                      

Engr. Shoaib Hassan Khaskheli