Course Outline
Schedule is subject to change
| Week | Date | Lecture | Assignment | Assignment Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 08/25 | Class Overview/Intro to NLP | HW0 (Self-Assessment) | 08/29 (11:59pm) |
| 1 | 08/27 | Linguistics in the Age of AI | ||
| 2 | 09/01 | No class (Labor Day) | ||
| 2 | 09/03 | Information Theory and Evaluation | ||
| 3 | 09/08 | Bayes’ Theorem, Naive Bayes Classification for Sentiment Analysis | HW1 (Bayes’ Theorem) | 09/15 (11:59pm) |
| 3 | 09/10 | N-gram Modeling | ||
| 4 | 09/15 | From Naive Bayes to Logistic Regression | PA1 (Logistic Regression) | 09/22 (11:59pm) |
| 4 | 09/17 | Model Training Using Gradient Descent | ||
| 5 | 09/22 | Edit Distance, Context-free grammars | ||
| 5 | 09/24 | CKY Parsing | ||
| 6 | 09/29 | Hidden Markov Models | HW2 (HMM) | 10/06 (11:59pm) |
| 6 | 10/01 | Viterbi Algorithm, Graphical Models and CRFs | Project Proposal | 10/28 (11:59pm) |
| 7 | 10/06 | Part-of-speech Tagging with Structured Perceptrons | PA2 (POS Tagger) | 10/17 (11:59pm) |
| 7 | 10/08 | Annotation and the MATTER Cycle | ||
| 8 | 10/13 | Intro to Neural Networks for NLP | ||
| 8 | 10/15 | Distributional Semantics and word2vec | PA3 (Distributional Semantics) | 10/30 (11:59pm) |
| 9 | 10/20 | CNNs in NLP | ||
| 9 | 10/22 | RNNs in NLP | PA4 (Neural Parser) | 11/10 (11:59pm) |
| 10 | 10/27 | LSTMs and Attention Mechanisms | ||
| 10 | 10/29 | Transformers | ||
| 11 | 11/03 | Transformers: Revenge of the Networks | ||
| 11 | 11/05 | Mega Encoder vs. Giant Decoder | ||
| 12 | 11/10 | RLHF: LLMs is People! | PA5 (Attention Mechanism) | 11/21 (11:59pm) |
| 12 | 11/12 | Offline Preference Optimization: Your Language Model Is Secretly a Reward Model | ||
| 13 | 11/17 | Class canceled (instructor travel) | PA6 (Reward Modeling) | 12/03 (11:59pm) |
| 13 | 11/19 | Class canceled (instructor travel) | ||
| 14 | 11/24 | No classes (Fall break) | ||
| 14 | 11/26 | No classes (Fall break) | ||
| 15 | 12/01 | Scaling Laws: All Hail LLMs! | ||
| 15 | 12/03 | How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Large Language Models | ||
| 16 | 12/08 | Ethical and Social Issues in NLP | ||
| 16 | 12/10 | Final Project Lightning Presentations | ||
| 17 | 12/15 | No class (Finals week – no final exam) | ||
| 17 | 12/17 | No class (Finals week – no final exam) | Projects due |
