Northeastern University's NiuTrans Team Releases Open-Source NLP Textbook: From Neural Network Basics to Large Language Models

Northeastern University's NiuTrans team has released the open-source NLP textbook Natural Language Processing: Neural Networks and Large Language Models, which includes 11 chapters covering content from neural network basics to cutting-edge technologies of large language models. The textbook has provided multilingual LLM-translated versions and received over 600 stars on GitHub, aiming to promote knowledge sharing and lower the learning threshold for NLP.

The NLP field is in urgent need of systematic learning resources. Northeastern University's NiuTrans team (a brand of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory) has long been deeply engaged in machine translation, text generation, and other directions, with research results repeatedly published in top conferences and journals. The textbook was written by Tong Xiao and Jingbo Zhu, with the concept of open knowledge sharing to help lower the learning threshold for NLP.

The textbook is divided into three parts with a total of 11 chapters:

1. Preliminary Knowledge: Basics of machine learning (supervised/unsupervised/reinforcement learning, evaluation and optimization), basics of neural networks (perceptron, backpropagation, activation functions, etc.);
2. Basic Models: Word vectors (Word2Vec/GloVe), RNN/CNN sequence modeling, Seq2Seq models, Transformer architecture (including additional explanations and practical guidance);
3. Large Language Models: Pre-training techniques (strategies like BERT/GPT), generative models (decoding strategies), prompt engineering (zero-shot/few-shot/chain-of-thought), alignment (SFT/RLHF), inference optimization (quantization/pruning/distillation).

Academic Value: The content covers a complete knowledge chain from basics to cutting-edge, with some chapters derived from the authors' high-quality papers to ensure rigor; Practice-Oriented: Each chapter is accompanied by PDF lecture notes, and the repository provides code examples and experimental guidance; Multilingual Support: Translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, and other languages via LLM technology to expand global accessibility.

The textbook has received over 600 stars and 110+ forks on GitHub, and is popular in the developer community; the team continuously revises and supplements content to keep up with NLP developments; readers can communicate with the authors via GitHub Issues, and open interaction promotes the improvement of the textbook's quality.

Learning Recommendations: Beginners should learn progressively in chapter order, while those with a foundation can directly skip to the large language model chapters; Practical Significance: Mastering the content enables core capabilities in NLP research and development, supporting tasks such as text classification, machine translation, and LLM fine-tuning.

This open-source textbook is a high-quality learning resource that embodies the spirit of open sharing in academia. It provides a basic framework for learners in the NLP field, is a valuable resource for in-depth exploration of the field, and helps cultivate the next generation of researchers and engineers.