COM SCI 263
Natural Language Processing
Description: Lecture, four hours; discussion, two hours; outside study, six hours. Natural language processing (NLP) enables computers to understand and process human languages. NLP techniques have been widely used in many applications, including machine translation, question answering, machine summarization, and information extraction. Study of fundamental elements and recent trends in NLP. Students gain ability to apply NLP techniques in text-orientated applications, understand machine learning and algorithms used in NLP, and propose new approaches to solve NLP problems. Letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - This class is an introduction to NLP and covers tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, word representation, syntactic parsing, semantic parsing, co-reference resolution, machine translation and more. The models and algorithms used for these tasks are a mixture of classical ones (e.g Hidden Markov Models) and modern ones (e.g Transformer neural nets), where the class focuses more on the latter. Generally, I am very happy with Prof Chang's delivery of this material. The lectures are well-prepared and interactive and are updated regularly to include new concepts, interesting papers, etc. I especially like the quality of the lecture slides, which are almost good enough to learn from on entirely their own. One issue I had with the class is that it is fairly work-intensive. Here is the list of assignments in the class: -Weekly quizzes (5 in total) -1 midterm group project -1 paper group presentation -1 final group project -1 final exam -Various peer reviews While there are quite a few, I did like the hands-on nature of these assignments. We could implement a range of different approaches for each project and even had the opportunity to peer-review other students' work. I found the latter especially useful as it gives you a better way to compare and learn than only receiving a grade. Overall I can really recommend this class to someone interested in NLP. Its material is current and the instructors genuinely want to help you learn about the field.
Spring 2022 - This class is an introduction to NLP and covers tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, word representation, syntactic parsing, semantic parsing, co-reference resolution, machine translation and more. The models and algorithms used for these tasks are a mixture of classical ones (e.g Hidden Markov Models) and modern ones (e.g Transformer neural nets), where the class focuses more on the latter. Generally, I am very happy with Prof Chang's delivery of this material. The lectures are well-prepared and interactive and are updated regularly to include new concepts, interesting papers, etc. I especially like the quality of the lecture slides, which are almost good enough to learn from on entirely their own. One issue I had with the class is that it is fairly work-intensive. Here is the list of assignments in the class: -Weekly quizzes (5 in total) -1 midterm group project -1 paper group presentation -1 final group project -1 final exam -Various peer reviews While there are quite a few, I did like the hands-on nature of these assignments. We could implement a range of different approaches for each project and even had the opportunity to peer-review other students' work. I found the latter especially useful as it gives you a better way to compare and learn than only receiving a grade. Overall I can really recommend this class to someone interested in NLP. Its material is current and the instructors genuinely want to help you learn about the field.
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2024 - I liked this class as an introduction to NLP, but I don't think it went too deep into any topics. The first homework was presenting on a NLP paper and peer reviewing, which I thought was interesting. The second homework was a bit more bland, but I think Professor Peng said she is going to change it after student feedback. Project is also very doable in terms of workload since there's only two homeworks. Exams were really fair and doable as well. The professor really seems to care about learning and student feedback, so I can only imagine that this class will get better and better as more iterations are offered!
Spring 2024 - I liked this class as an introduction to NLP, but I don't think it went too deep into any topics. The first homework was presenting on a NLP paper and peer reviewing, which I thought was interesting. The second homework was a bit more bland, but I think Professor Peng said she is going to change it after student feedback. Project is also very doable in terms of workload since there's only two homeworks. Exams were really fair and doable as well. The professor really seems to care about learning and student feedback, so I can only imagine that this class will get better and better as more iterations are offered!
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