Calendar

What is NLP for, and what does success look like?

M Jan 6
Introduction (slides)
Assignment 0 posted; read, sign, and submit (through Canvas) the academic integrity document
W Jan 8
Case study on question answering (slides)
J&M 14 intro, 14.1, 14.4
Th Jan 9
Section Assignment 0 (slides)

Input-focused NLP -- classifying text

M Jan 13
Basics of classification, multinomial logistic regression, evaluation (slides)
Read J&M 5; Assignment 1 posted
W Jan 15
Neural networks (slides)
Read J&M 7 through 7.5
Th Jan 16
SectionGradient Descent and Logistic Regression (slides)
M Jan 20
Holiday; no lecture
Assignment 2 posted
W Jan 22
Classification tasks and data (slides)
Read J&M 4 intro, 4.7, 4.8 Assignment 1 due
Th Jan 23
Section A2, word embeddings (slides)

Segmenting text

M Jan 27
Data-driven segmentation of text; guest lecture from Alisa Liu (slides)
Read J&M 2 through 2.6; project checkpoint 1
W Jan 29
Linguistic segmentation of text; guest lecture from Valentin Hofmann (slides)
Read Bender ch. 1 and 2; Assignment 2 due
Th Jan 30
SectionMorphology and Tokenization (slides)

Input-focused NLP -- embeddings

M Feb 3
Lexical semantics and embeddings (slides)
Read J&M 6 and optionally J&M 11 through 11.3; Assignment 3 posted

Output-focused NLP -- generating text

W Feb 5
Language models (slides)
Read J&M 3
Th Feb 6
SectionAssignments 3 and Vector Embeddings (slides)
M Feb 10
Language models, continued (slides)
Read J&M 7.6-7.7 and J&M chapter 8 through 8.7
Assignment 4 posted; Project checkpoint 2
W Feb 12
Machine translation, the canonical sequence-to-sequence task (slides)
Read J&M 13, skipping 13.4; Assignment 3 due
Th Feb 13
SectionMachine Translation (slides)
M Feb 17
Holiday; no lecture
W Feb 19
Attention and transformers (slides)
Read J&M 9;
Th Feb 20
SectionAssignment 4 and Transformers (slides)
F Feb 21
(No lecture)
Assignment 4 due
M Feb 24
Decoding (slides)
Read J&M 13.4; Assignment 5 posted
W Feb 26
Scaling up; guest lecture from Weijia Shi (slides)
Read J&M 10
Th Feb 27
SectionAssignment 5 and Encoder-Decoder vs Decoder Models (slides)
M Mar 3
Prompting (slides)
Read J&M 12.1; Assignment 6 posted; Project checkpoint 3 (for CSE 447)
W Mar 5
Finetuning, instructions, preferences (slides)
Read J&M 12, and J&M 14.3, and optionally J&M 11.4; Assignment 5 due
Th Mar 6
SectionAssignment 5 and Prompt Engineering (slides)

Looking ahead to the future

M Mar 10
Societal impact of NLP; guest lecture from Hila Gonen (slides) :
W Mar 12
Open research challenges
Assignment 6 due
Th Mar 13
No section
F Mar 14
Project due