- 11/26/18 [473/673] Assignment 5 is available.
It's due 12/10/18, by 11:59 AM.
- 11/8/18 [473/673] Assignment 4 is available.
It's due 11/26/18, by 11:59 AM.
- 11/7/18 [473/673] The project update is now due Friday November 16th by 11:59 AM.
- 10/3/18 [473/673] Assignment 3 is available.
It's due 10/26/18, by 11:59 AM.
- 9/10/18 [473/673] Assignment 2 is available.
It's due 10/1/18, by 11:59 AM.
- 9/5/18 [473/673] The course project description is available.
- 8/29/18 [673] The Graduate Paper prompt is available.
There are multiple due dates.
- 8/29/18 [473/673] Assignment 1 is available.
It's due 9/10/18, by 11:59 AM.
- 8/29/18 [473/673] Assignments and coursework can be submitted through the submission script, available at https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/undergraduate/473/f18/submit.
You must be logged in with your UMBC ID.
- 8/28/17 [473/673] The syllabus is available.
Check out the syllabus (to be released soon) for all this information, including policies on academic honesty, accomodations, and late assignments.
- Meeting Times
-
Sherman Hall, 015
Monday & Wednesday, 1pm - 2:15pm
- Instructor
-
Frank Ferraro
ferraro [at] umbc [dot] edu
ITE 358
Monday 2:15 - 3pm
Tuesday 11:00 - 11:30
by appointment
- TA
-
Caroline Kery
ckery1 [at] umbc [dot] edu
Tuesday 2:00 - 3:30
Thursday 1:00 - 2:30
by appointment
ITE 349
- Topics
-
The topics covered will include
- probability, classification, and the efficacy of simple counting methods
- language modeling (n-gram models, smoothing heuristics, maxent/log-linear models, and distributed/vector-valued representations)
- sequences of latent variables (e.g., hidden Markov models, some basic machine translation alignment)
- trees and graphs, as applied to syntax and semantics
- some discourse-related applications (coreference resolution, textual entailment), and
- special and current topics (e.g., fairness and ethics in NLP).
- Goals
-
After taking this course, you will
- be introduced to some of the core problems and solutions of NLP;
- learn different ways that success and progress can be measured in NLP;
- be exposed to how these problems relate to those in statistics, machine learning, and linguistics;
- have experience implementing a number of NLP programs;
- read and analyze research papers;
- practice your (written) communication skills.
The following schedule of topics is subject to change.
Legend:
- 2SLP: 2nd Edition of Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing.
- 3SLP: draft 3rd Edition of Jurafsky and Martin's Speech and Language Processing.
The authors have made the chapters, as they're rewritten, available: https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3/.
Date |
Topic |
Suggested Reading |
Assignment Out |
Assignment Due |
Wednesday, 8/29
|
Intro: what is NLP?
|
2SLP: Ch 1
|
[473/673]
Assignment 1
[673]
Graduate Paper
|
— |
Wednesday, 9/5
|
Probability Concepts & Language Modeling
|
3SLP: Ch 2.2
3SLP: Ch 4
2SLP: Ch 4
|
[473/673] Course Project
|
— |
Monday, 9/10
|
3SLP: Ch 4
|
[473/673] Assignment 2
|
[473/673] Assignment 1
|
Wednesday, 9/12
|
— |
— |
Monday, 9/17-Monday, 9/24
|
Intro to ML: the Noisy Channel Model, & Classification
|
3SLP: Ch 4
|
— |
— |
Wednesday, 9/26
|
Naïve Bayes, Maximum Entropy (Log-linear) Models, and Neural Language Models
|
3SLP: Ch 7
Ferraro and Eisner (2013)
|
— |
— |
Monday, 10/1 |
— |
Assignment 2 |
Wednesday, 10/3 |
[473/673] Assignment 3
|
— |
Monday, 10/8 |
— |
— |
Wednesday, 10/10
|
Distributed Representations
|
3SLP: Ch 6
|
— |
— |
Friday, 10/12 |
— |
[473/673] Project Proposal
|
Monday, 10/15 |
— |
— |
Wednesday, 10/17 |
[673] Graduate Paper |
— |
Monday, 10/22
|
Intro to Latent Sequences & Expectation Maximization
|
|
—
|
—
|
Wednesday, 10/24
|
—
|
—
|
Friday, 10/26
|
—
|
—
|
—
|
[473/673] Assignment 3
|
Monday, 10/29
|
Intro to Hidden Markov Models/Midterm Review
|
|
— |
— |
Wednesday, 10/31
|
Midterm
|
— |
— |
Monday, 11/5
|
HMMs Continued
- Task: Part of speech
- Forward Algorithm
- Viterbi Algorithm
- Backward Algorithm
- EM/Baum Welch
- Semi-supervised learning)
|
— |
— |
Wednesday, 11/7
|
[473/673] Assignment 4 |
— |
Monday, 11/12
|
— |
— |
Wednesday, 11/14
|
— |
[673] Graduate Paper Reviews |
Friday, 11/16
|
— |
[473/673] Project Update |
Monday, 11/19
|
— |
— |
Wednesday, 11/21 |
Overview of other Latent Models:
- Machine Translation Alignment
- State-based Sequence Models: MEMMs and CRFs
- Recurrent Neural Networks
|
|
— |
— |
Monday, 11/26 |
Overview of Syntax
|
3SLP: Ch 10, Ch 11
|
[473/673] Assignment 5 |
[473/673] Assignment 4 |
Wednesday, 11/28 |
—
|
—
|
December, 12/3 |
Semantics:
|
3SLP: Ch 17, Ch 18
|
—
|
—
|
Wednesday, 12/5 |
—
|
[673] Final Graduate Paper
|
Monday, 12/10 |
—
|
[473/673] Assignment 5
|
Wednesday, 12/19
|
|
—
|
— |
[473/673] Course Project
|