Today we are highlighting Junior Ilayda Koca, and her experience with Undergraduate Data Science Minor at Vanderbilt. Hear more about what she has to say about her experience.
“Last spring, I took a project course as a part of my Data Science minor requirements to contribute to the Legal Project lead by Professor Bell at the Data Science Institute. My journey was a deep dive into the technical complexities of legal text analysis. I had the opportunity to develop a question-answering pipeline specifically tailored for legal documents using Python’s Haystack framework.
The project challenged me to navigate through a vast collection of legal case documents. Implementing both dense and sparse vector retrieval methods, including TF-IDF and Dense Passage Retrieval, I honed my skills in efficiently narrowing down search spaces in large datasets.
The core of my learning was working with transformer-based models like BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT. These powerful tools allowed me to build a reader component capable of extracting accurate and context-aware answers, a crucial skill in the field of Natural Language Processing.
This experience at Vanderbilt’s Data Science Institute has equipped me with not just technical expertise but also a keen understanding of practical applications in real-world scenarios. For anyone passionate about data science and its applications in novel areas, Vanderbilt offers an unparalleled platform to explore, innovate, and grow.”