Xavier School of Engineering and Technology (XSET) organised a special lecture on “Introduction to Language AI” on September 2, 2026 at the university campus. Dr. Saptarsi Goswami, a distinguished academician was the resource person. The session was for the students of two departments of Computer Science & Engineering. 

Dr. Goswami led an engaging and insightful session on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Language AI, providing students with a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly evolving field and its practical applications. Using examples of linguistic ambiguity, complex sentences, typos, abbreviations and mixed-case text, he demonstrated the challenges machines face while interpreting human language. The session then traced the evolution of language technologies, covering bag-of-words models, pre-transformer classification techniques, Word2Vec, semantic embeddings, self-attention and transformer architectures.

Dr. Goswami also introduced students to leading Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT, BERT, Gemini and LLaMA, and explained the major stages involved in training such models—pretraining, supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. The discussion further explored practical aspects of generative AI, including prompting techniques, controlling model outputs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic AI. Students were also introduced to agent architectures and the ReAct framework.

The session concluded with a formal vote of thanks, leaving students with a stronger conceptual understanding of Language AI and enthusiasm to explore the field further.

Ms. Priyani Dasgupta

Student, Computer Science and Engineering