HANGZHOU, China, March 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Westlake University today announced the launch of a free, open online course on Natural Language Processing (NLP), taught by Professor Yue Zhang, head of the NLP Lab at the School of Engineering. Recorded live from Zhang's undergraduate lectures, the course will be released on Westlake University's YouTube channel every Monday and Thursday, making world-class NLP education freely accessible to learners worldwide.

From writing assistants to personalized recommendations, large language models (LLMs) have become part of our daily life. Yet when AI mistakes sarcasm for compliments or confidently generates inaccurate information, it exposes a fundamental gap between pattern recognition and genuine language understanding.

Designed to close that gap, Zhang's course takes a rigorous dive into the science behind how AI processes language. A Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Zhang has continuously refined this course since its debut as a doctoral-level offering in 2019, incorporating student feedback and rapid advances in the field. The 2026 version reflects the latest developments in LLMs while preserving the strong mathematical and theoretical foundations that defines the course.

"From statistical NLP to deep learning, pre-training, and large models, this course covers the complete arc of its development over the recent decades," said Zhang. "Students will come away with a professional-level understanding of NLP's core technologies and the mathematical principles that underpin them."

The 15-lecture course is structured to balances foundational concepts with cutting-edge content. While efficiently covering classical NLP topics, Zhang dedicates three full lectures to LLMs, offering deep technical insights from a natural language processing perspective. The course is designed to be accessible at multiple levels: Lecture 1 introduces the history of NLP without requiring any mathematical background, while later sessions are pitched at aspiring researchers ready to engage with state-of-the-art papers and algorithm design. Hands-on learners are encouraged to form teams online to tackle assignments, and leverage AI tools as on-demand teaching assistants.

Complementing the course, Cambridge University Press will release a new edition of Natural Language Processing: A Machine Learning Perspective co-authored by Zhang. An accompanied intelligent teaching platform will also become available shortly. This textbook has already been adopted by Beijing Institute of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), and universities across Europe.

"After completing this course, you'll have a comprehensive view of natural language processing," Zhang added. "From there, you can dive deeper into branch that interests you, be it traditional computational linguistics or the latest advances in large language models."

Course Details:

Title: Natural Language Processing
Instructor: Professor Yue Zhang, Westlake University
Format: 15 lectures, recorded from Spring 2025 classroom sessions
Language: English
Release Schedule: Every Monday and Thursday from March 9, 2026
Platforms: YouTube: Westlake University channel

About Yue Zhang:

Professor Yue Zhang holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University (2003) and a doctorate from the University of Oxford (2009), followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge. In 2025, he was named an ACL Fellow.

Additional Resources

Textbook: Natural Language Processing: A Machine Learning Perspective (Cambridge University Press) — new edition forthcoming 2026

CONTACT:
Chi Zhang,
media@westlake.edu.cn, 
+86-15659837873

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SOURCE Westlake University