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This course provides an overview of the field of natural language processing. The goal of the field is to build technologies that will allow machines to understand human langauges. Applications include machine translation, automatic summarization, question answering systems, and dialog systems.

You do not need to email the instructor to receive a permit, instead you should sign yourself up for the waitlist After you’ve added yourself to the waitlist, the instructor can issue you a permit. You will receive an email saying permit available. You will receive another email when the permit is issued. At that point, you may register on CoursesInTouch.

The Term Project has been released. The assignment has multiple deliverables.
Homework Option 3 - Generating Text with Large Pre-Trained Language Models has been released. It is due before 11:59AM on Friday, May 7, 2021.
Course number
CIS 530 - Computational Linguistics
Instructor
Mark Yatskar
Discussion Forum
Piazza
Time and place
Spring 2021, Tuesday and Thursday 1:30-2:30pm via Zoom. Attendance is optional, but the instructor will be recording lectures with those that would like to attend and ask questions. Lectures will be posted on Canvas immediately following the lecture.
First day of class is January 21, 2021
Last day of class is May 11, 2021
Office hours
To join the office hour queue, please go to OHQ.io.
Monday 8:30pm - 10:00pm Eastern - Pengrui
Tuesday 10:30am - 12:00pm Eastern - Haren
Tuesday 5:00pm - 6:30pm Eastern - Chaitanya
Wednesday 1:30pm - 3:00pm Eastern - Mark zoom
Wednesday 3:00pm - 4:30pm Eastern - Yue
Thursday 3:00pm -4:30pm Eastern - Weiqiu
Saturday 10:00am - 11:30am Eastern - Daniel
Textbooks
Both textbooks are available for free on the web.
Speech and Language Processing (3rd edition draft) by Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin
Natural Language Processing by Jacob Eisenstein
The course will have weekly required readings.
Grading
The grading for the course will consist of:
  • 60% for weekly homework assignments
  • 15% for quizzes about the readings
  • 25% for the final project or 3 optional homeworks

Homeworks and quizes are weighted equally within their respective categories.

Homework will be released two weeks before it is due. There will be 8 homeworks, roughly due weekly. Please see the Schedule
Final Project will be done in groups of 3 or more. If you cannot think of a topic, or are struggling to form a team, you can do 4 alternative homeworks.
Collaboration Policy
Unless otherwise noted, you are allowed to work in pairs on the homework assignment. Both partners will receive the same grade. The final projects will have larger groups.
Late Day Policy
Each student has ten free “late days”. Homeworks can be submitted at most three days late. If you are out of late days, then you will not be able to get credit for subsequent late assignments. One “day” is defined as anytime between 1 second and 24 hours after the homework deadline. The intent of the late day policy it to allow you to take extra time due to unforseen circumstances like illnesses. You do not need to ask permission to use your late days.