Jordan Boyd-Graber

Jordan Boyd-Graber
4146 Iribe
Computer Science
jbg@boydgraber.org

Graduate Natural Language Processing (INST 735 / CMSC 723 / LING 723)

Logistics

Location	Iribe 1116
Time	Mon./Wed. 14:00 - 15:15
Webpage	http://umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/teaching/CMSC_723/
Mailing List	https://piazza.com/umd/fall2024/cmsc723inst735
Text	Speech and Language Processing
Homework Submission	Gradescope
Syllabus	https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kTDrtQGpascUUUt2q4gBZXZ_zJ97e-uCd1QONlyAgmE/edit?usp=sharing

People

Professors

Jordan Boyd-Graber
Book Office Hours (Iribe 4146)

Naomi Feldman
Office Hours Monday 3:30-4:30 (Iribe 4152)

Teaching Assistants

• FNU Sakshi: Friday 9:00-10:00 (1st Floor Iribe)
• Kyle Seelman (Responsible for Gradescope, by appointment only)
• Ashish Seth: Thursday 16:00-17:00 (1st Floor Iribe)

Schedule

Date	In-Class Topic	Assignment Due
Monday, 26. August 2024	What the class is about
	Readings Speech and Language Processing Chapter 1 Topics What is the course about? Structure of the course (nhf) Discussion of co-teaching / pedagogy / delivery (jbg) Linguistic Background (nhf) Programming Background (jbg) Math Background (jbg) Optional Readings (Background) Python (and programming) introductory course Statistics review (first few weeks) Probability primer How the statistical revolution changed (computational) linguistics Deep learning revolution Math Review Videos Functions Distributions Vectors Matrix math Gradients and Optimization
Wednesday, 28. August 2024	What's a sentence, morpheme, type, token, word, etc. (nhf)
	Readings Jackendoff Patterns in the Mind Chapter 6 Language Files Chapter 4 Language Files Chapter 6.6 Optional Readings (Reference) Bender Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing Topics Linguistic analysis Syntax Morphology Types and tokens
Friday, 30. August 2024	Homework Due	Limerick
Monday, 02. September 2024	Labor Day
Wednesday, 04. September 2024	Classical language models (jbg)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 3 Optional Readings (Background) An Empirical Study of Smoothing Techniques for Language Modeling Prediction and Entropy of Printed English A Bayesian Interpretation of Interpolated Kneser-Ney Topics Bigram Language Models Evaluation Backoff Videos Bigram Language Models Shannon Game Perplexity Backoff
Monday, 09. September 2024	What's in the speech signal (nhf)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 16 p. 1-11 Optional Readings (Background) Phonetics Topics Waveforms Spectrograms Formants MFCCs Resources IPA chart
Wednesday, 11. September 2024	Classification and evaluation (nhf)
	Readings SLP Chapter 5 Topics Logistic regression Training and test data Loss functions Gradient descent
Friday, 13. September 2024	Homework Due	Bigram Language Model
Monday, 16. September 2024	Pytorch and Logistic Regression (jbg)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 7 Pytorch Tutorial Topics Deep Learning XOR Pytorch Logreg DAN in Pytorch Videos Deep Learning Backprop Frameworks Pytorch DAN
Wednesday, 18. September 2024	Learning word representations (jbg)
	Readings SLP 6 Optional Readings Neural Word Embedding as Implicit Matrix Factorization GloVe Topics Distributional and Distributed Representations Sparse Representations Word2Vec Training Distributional Models Videos Distributed/Distributional Representations word2vec algorithm tf-idf
Friday, 20. September 2024	Homework Due	Classification
Monday, 23. September 2024	Linear neural language models (jbg)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 8 Optional Readings Backpack LMs Topics RNN for Sentiment RNN for LM RNN in Pytorch LSTM Backpack LM Videos RNN for Sentiment RNN for LM LSTM RNN in Pytorch
Wednesday, 25. September 2024	Transformers (jbg)
	Readings SLP 9 Optional Readings Annotated Transformer Illustrated Transformer Transformer in an Excel Spreadsheet Topics Muppet Models Attention w/ Backpacks Transformers Videos Encoder BERTology Decoder
Monday, 30. September 2024	Decoding (nhf)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 10 Topics Self-attention Masked attention Risks Strategies for analyzing representations
Wednesday, 02. October 2024	Alignment (jbg)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 12 Topics Implementation Details RL Review Policy Gradient RLHF Videos Implementation
Friday, 04. October 2024 [Rosh Hashana]	Homework Due	Feature Engineering
Monday, 07. October 2024	Prompting and Fine-Tuning (jbg)
	Readings Prompting Survey LoRA Topics Fine-Tuning and LoRA Prompt Optimization Why Muppet Models Videos Muppet Models
Wednesday, 09. October 2024	Neural ASR (nhf)
	Readings Connectionist temporal classification Convolutional networks Optional Readings Geometric analysis Topics Convolutional layers Self-supervised models CTC loss Representational geometry
Friday, 11. October 2024	Homework Due	Project Proposal
Monday, 14. October 2024	Structure in language: HMMs and PCFGs (nhf)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 17 SLP3 Chapter 18 Topics HMMs PCFGs Dynamic programming Parsing Expectation maximization Jordan's Videos HMM HMM Estimation Viterbi Context Free Grammar Probabilistic Grammars CYK Algorithm
Wednesday, 16. October 2024	Syntax: Dependency Grammars (nhf)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 19 Optional Readings Dependency Parsing Book Topics Dependency grammars Shift-reduce parsing Jordan's Videos Dependency Grammars Shift-Reduce
Monday, 21. October 2024 [Succos]	Semantics (nhf)
	Readings SLP Chapter 21 Optional Readings (Background) Semantics Topics Compositional semantics Lambda calculus Combinatory categorial grammar Representations of time Semantic role labeling
Wednesday, 23. October 2024 [Succos]	Machine translation (jbg)
	Readings SLP Chapter 13 Videos Why MT is Hard Model 1 Phrase-Based Evaluation Lectures What is MT, why is it hard, how is it evaluated? Word-based Models Phrase-based Models Neural Decoding
Friday, 25. October 2024 [Simchas Torah]	Homework Due	DAN
Monday, 28. October 2024	Question Answering (jbg)
	Readings SLP Chapter 14 Videos How QA Saved Civilization The Turing Test Watson on Jeopardy! Datasets Cranfield vs. Manchester Dense Retrieval Multihop Topics How QA Saved Civilization / The Turing Test Manchester vs. Cranfield Dense Retrieval Multihop
Wednesday, 30. October 2024	Coreference (nhf)
	Readings SLP3 Chapter 23 Topics Mentions Entities The problem of coreference Rule-based systems and features Neural end-to-end systems
Friday, 01. November 2024	Homework Due	Syntax
Monday, 04. November 2024	Writing and Reviewing Papers (jbg)
	Readings On Writing Well (Part 1) https://ceulearning.ceu.edu/pluginfile.php/100337/mod_forum/attachment/9319/Zinsser%20On%20Writing%20Well%20pt1.pdf Topics Structure Mechanics Audience Optional Reading 机器翻译学术论⽂ 写作⽅法和技巧 Videos LaTeX: The writing tool we love to hate Sentences and Paragraphs What a good paper looks like How to write an effective abstract Citation mistakes Writing for different audiences Virtual presentations
Wednesday, 06. November 2024	Careers in NLP (jbg)
	Optional Readings How JMLR Works Topics Reviewing Landscape of the Field Video Presenting Virtual Conferences Videos How to review a paper Video Presentations Best ACL Videos Virtual Conferences don't have to Suck How Conferences Make their Money Venues Jobs Impact
Friday, 08. November 2024 [Shavuos]	Homework Due	Finetuning
Monday, 11. November 2024	Midterm Review (TA)
Wednesday, 13. November 2024	Midterm (nhf)
Monday, 18. November 2024	Modeling human Sentence Processing (nhf)
Wednesday, 20. November 2024	Modeling human Speech Perception (nhf)
Friday, 22. November 2024	Homework Due	Project Deliverable
Monday, 25. November 2024	Annotation (nhf)
	Optional Readings Analyzing Dataset Annotation Annotation Quality Management in the Wild
Wednesday, 27. November 2024	Thanksgiving
Monday, 02. December 2024	Multimodal (jbg)
Wednesday, 04. December 2024	Ask Us Anything
Friday, 06. December 2024	Homework Due	Poster
Monday, 09. December 2024	Poster day

Page by Jordan Boyd-Graber.