This schedule is tentative and subject to change as the semester progresses.

Date Lecture Reading Assignment
Introduction, N-grams
Th 1/11 1 What is NLP? SLP2 ch. 1 A0: The Basics
Tu 1/16 2 Text Processing, Tasks, and Corpora; ChatGPT activity on Zoom due to πŸŒ¨β„β›„ SLP3 2.0–2.3, NLTK Book 3.2–3.10
Th 1/18 3 N-gram language models SLP3 3.0–3.5.2; Goldwater probability review through section 4 A0 due
Tu 1/23 4 N-gram language models contd. A1: N-Gram Language Models
Th 1/25 5 Overview of Linguistics Features English is missing - but most other languages have; SLP2 1.1, SLP3 13.1
Classification
Tu 1/30 6 Classification: naΓ―ve Bayes; Noisy Channel Model SLP3 4.0–4.5
Th 2/1 7 Lexical semantics: senses, relations, classes SLP3 23.0–23.3
Fr 2/2 A1 due
Tu 2/6 8 Linear models for classification: features & weights SLP3 5.0–5.2 A2: Perceptron
Th 2/8 9 Linear models for classification: discriminative learning (perceptron, SVMs, MaxEnt) DaumΓ© The Perceptron: 4.0–4.3; SLP3 4.7–4.8, ch. 5 (Further readings are suggested in slides)
Tu 2/13 10 Linear models contd.
Sequential Prediction
Th 2/15 11 Parts of speech SLP3 8.0–8.3
F 2/16 A2 due
Tu 2/20 No class: classes follow Monday schedule
Th 2/22 12 POS tagging: HMMs SLP3 8.4.0–8.4.3 Eisenstein Notes, 7.1: Part-of-speech tagging
F 2/23 MIDTERM 1 (See study guide worksheet)
Tu 2/27 13 Algorithms for HMMs (mainly Viterbi); BONUS: Discriminative tagging with the structured perceptron SLP3 8.4.4–8.4.6, Appendix A; BONUS: Eisenstein Notes, 7.5 (no need to read beyond structured perceptron); Neubig slides
Th 2/29 14 Annotation; Universal POS annotation activity (tagset) A3: HMM
M-F 3/4-3/8 No class or office hours: Spring Break
Distributed Representations and Neural Networks
Tu 3/12 15 Distributional representations and similarity SLP3 ch. 6
Th 3/14 16 Deep learning and neural networks SLP3 7.0–7.1, 7.3–7.5
F 3/15 A3 due
Tu 3/19 17 Neural sequence modeling with RNNs SLP3 9.1–9.8; BONUS: Details of LSTMs A4: LSTMs
Hierarchical Sentence Structure
Th 3/21 18 Final project options. English syntax, CFGs SLP3 17.0–17.2, skim 17.3
Tu 3/26 19 Syntax contd.; project: review task options and submit preferences P0: Submit project team with topic
Th-M 3/28-4/1 No class or office hours: Easter Break
Tu 4/2 20 (P)CFG parsing: Parsing as search; CNF.
Th 4/4 21 (P)CFG parsing contd.: CKY walkthrough SLP3 17.5–17.8, Appendix C C.0-C.4
F 4/5 A4 due
Tu 4/9 22 (P)CFG parsing contd.
Th 4/11 23 In-class project work session and team meetings with course staff P1: 1-2 page proposal due
Tu 4/16 24 Dependency parsing SLP3 18.0-18.2, 18.4 A5: Syntax
Sequence-to-Sequence, Translation, and Other Applications
Th 4/18 25 Neural sequence-to-sequence models SLP3 9.7–9.8, 10.0–10.2
Tu 4/23 26 Guest Lecture: Computational pragmatics (Brandon Waldon) P2: Progress update, including lit review, due
Th 4/25 27 Text generation (mainly QA, summarization, MT; mention dialog, image captioning) (Shabnam Behzad) + Wrap-up SLP3 13, 14.2, 14.4–14.7
F 4/26 A5 due
Tu 4/30 28 Project presentations
F 5/3 MIDTERM 2 Study guide to appear
W 5/8 No course meeting during final exam slot PROJECT REPORT DUE
Visit the GUCL website for NLP talks this semester and beyond!