Teaching NLP in the AI Era: Experiences from the University of Latvia
Inguna Skadina, Guntis Barzdins, Uldis Bojārs, Normunds Gruzitis, Pēteris Paikens
Abstract
From being a niche technology with practical applications in translation and speech recognition, NLP is now underpinning the AI era through LLMs, promising a universal economic impact in the future. Although transitioning to the AI era is hyped by BigTech companies, practical adoption of the LLM capabilities for economically impactful tasks and processes goes via education of specialists capable to apply it properly. Human-in-the-loop, accuracy measurement, fine-tuning, on-premises processing of sensitive data have become essential skills for applying NLP. This short paper introduces two language technology modules developed and piloted at the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Latvia.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.teachingnlp-1.6
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing (TeachNLP 2026)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Rabat, Morocco
- Editors:
- Matthias Aßenmacher, Laura Biester, Claudia Borg, György Kovács, Margot Mieskes, Sofia Serrano
- Venues:
- TeachingNLP | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 34–36
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.teachingnlp-1.6/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Inguna Skadina, Guntis Barzdins, Uldis Bojārs, Normunds Gruzitis, and Pēteris Paikens. 2026. Teaching NLP in the AI Era: Experiences from the University of Latvia. In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing (TeachNLP 2026), pages 34–36, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Teaching NLP in the AI Era: Experiences from the University of Latvia (Skadina et al., TeachingNLP 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.teachingnlp-1.6.pdf