Schedule

SCHEDULE

Week 0: Warmup and Regular Expressions (8/30, 9/1)

Reading: Syllabus (Mon 8/30), J&M 2.1 (Wed 9/1).

Other recommended reading:

• This blog post on text encodings and Unicode by David Zentgraf (stop at “Encodings and PHP”)

• This TechCrunch article by Devin Coldewey on Unicode’s role in the new Reiwa era in Japan

Assignments:

• Biographical Survey due Wednesday 9/8 before class. Please use your g.hmc.edu login.

• Worksheet (due Wed 9/1 before class)

• Lab 0: Warm Up, due Tue 9/7 at 10 PM

Presentation Slides: Monday, Wednesday (video)

Week 1: Regular Expressions Continued (9/8)

Labor Day Monday - no reading assignment

Assignments:

• Lab 1: Discord Chatbot, due Tue 9/14 at 10 PM

Week 2: Tokenization, Segmentation, and Evaluation (9/13, 9/15)

Reading:

• All - J&M 2.2-2.4 except 2.4.3, 4.7. Also, How to Read a Paper by S. Keshav.

• Sign up for discussion readings.

Assignments:

• Gradescope Worksheet (due before class Monday)

• Lab 2: Tokenization and Segmentation, due Tue 9/21 at 10 PM

Presentation Slides: Monday

Week 3: Probability, N-Grams, and Smoothing (9/20, 9/22)

Reading:

• All - J&M 3.1-3.4. Need a probability term refresher? Check out these videos on Bayes' Rule from 3Blue1Brown (created by Grant Sanderson) to refresh on terminology and for some beautiful visuals to help your probabilistic intuitions.

• Sign up for discussion readings.

Assignments:

• Gradescope Worksheet (due before class Monday)

• Lab 3: Zipf's Law and NGrams, due Tue 9/28 at 10 PM.

Presentation Slides: Monday (video)

Week 4: Vector Semantics (9/27, 9/29)

Reading:

• All - J&M 6.1-6.5, 6.10-6.12

• Sign up for discussion readings.

Assignment:

• Gradescope Worksheet (due before class Monday)

• Lab 4: GloVe Vectors, due Tue 10/5 at 10 PM.

Presentation Slides: Monday (video)

Week 5: Word Sense Disambiguation (10/4, 10/6)

Reading:

• All - J&M 18.1-18.5.1, 4.8-4.9 (starting on the bottom of page 13).

• Sign up for a SemEval paper to discuss.

Assignment:

• Gradescope Worksheet (due before class Monday)

• Lab 5: Senseval Decision List Classification, due Thursday 10/14 at 10 PM.

Presentation Slides: Monday (video)

Week 6: POS Tagging and NLP Ethics (10/11, 10/13)

Reading:

• J&M 8-8.4, plus a couple short papers and weekly readings (see instructions and sign up here.)

Assignment:

• Gradescope Worksheets (due before class Monday and Wednesday)

• In-class exercise: Evaluating Ethics Criteria for NLP

Wednesday is also a discussion day this week, but please still bring your laptop!

Presentation Slides: Monday (video), Wednesday

Week 7: POS Tagging Continued (10/20)

Fall Break Monday & Tuesday - no reading assignment

Assignment:

• Lab 6: Part of Speech Tagging, due Tuesday 10/26 at 10 PM.

Week 8: Text Classification (10/25, 10/27)

Reading:

• All - J&M 4-4.5, Don't Patronize Me dataset paper

Assignment:

• Lab 7: Classification, due Tuesday 11/2 at 10 PM. (Link pending; for now, see SemEval 2022 PCL Detection task page.)

Presentation Slides: Monday

Week 9: Project Brainstorming and Midterm Review (11/1, 11/3)

Monday - Midterm Review. Please sign up for a topic to help write questions for and be ready to contribute to some brainstorming! (Also fill in this survey about special topics so I can assign groups.)

Wednesday - Project Pitches, Guest Speaker: Angie McMillan-Major. Come with some project ideas!

Assignment:

• Sign up for a special projects presentation day (due 11/5)

• Project Pitch (due Sunday 11/14 at 10 PM). See the Final Projects page for more information.

Week 10: Midterm (11/8, 11/10)

Monday: Class canceled 11/8 for take-home midterm

Wednesday - a bit about neural nets and NLP, Guest Speaker: Jonathan Chang.

Week 11: Project Work and Special Topics (11/15, 11/17)

Monday:

• ST - Contextual Embeddings: Arora et al. (2020), "Contextual embeddings: are they worth it?"

• ST - Machine Translation: Ruiz and Federico (2014), "Complexity of spoken versus written language for machine translation"

Wednesday: Final project/lit review work time

Assignments:

• Reading linked above (no quiz)

• Related work + methods due December 2 by 10 PM on Gradescope (please bring a rough draft of related work for 11/22).

Week 12: Project Work and Special Topics (11/22)

Monday:

• ST - Text Generation: Radford et al. (2018), "Language models are unsupervised multitask learners"

• Peer Review Exercise for Literature Review. Please bring a draft of your Related Work section for your literature review to class for our exercise.
  (Note: attendance is mandatory for literature review exercise, but may be done by Zoom if you give me advance notice)
  Peer Review Worksheet (make a copy and share with the person you're reviewing): https://docs.google.com/document/d/196snRKtAyGElTt4dD3wCncKgPr-GfwWxXPVEZ2dtdDU/edit?usp=sharing
  If you need to upload your PDF to share it, you can do so here: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1todNB7O-46vQ-zrLndCTkardEg-heVlC

Assignments:

• Reading linked above (no quiz)

Thanksgiving Break starts Wednesday 11/24 - no class

Week 13: Project Work and Special Topics (11/29, 12/1)

Monday:

• ST - Automatic Speech Recognition: Chan et al. (2016), "Listen, attend, and spell: A neural network for large vocabulary conversational speech recognition"

Wednesday:

• ST - Dialogue Systems: Serban et al. (2016), "Building end-to-end dialogue systems using generative hierarchical neural network models"

• ST - Cultural Analytics: Bagga et al. (2021), “'Are you kidding me?': Detecting Unpalatable Questions on Reddit"

Assignments:

• Reading linked above

• Sign up for a presentation slot.

Week 14: Presentations and Wrapping Up (12/6, 12/8)

Monday, December 6: Presentation Day 1. Prepare a short presentation for class. Prof. Xanda will talk a bit about topic models, too.

Wednesday, December 8: Presentation Day 2. Prepare a short presentation for class. We'll have some reflective conversation about what we learned in this class. Also, course evaluations!

Finals Week

Final Paper due December 16th at 12 PM.