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 Muppet Models 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
Wednesday, 09. October 2024	Neural ASR (nhf)
	Readings Connectionist temporal classification Convolutional networks 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)
Wednesday, 16. October 2024	Syntax: Dependency Grammars (nhf)
Friday, 18. October 2024 [Succos]	Homework Due	DAN
Monday, 21. October 2024 [Succos]	Semantics (nhf)
Wednesday, 23. October 2024 [Succos]	Coreference (nhf)
Friday, 25. October 2024 [Simchas Torah]	Homework Due	Neural ASR
Monday, 28. October 2024	Machine translation (jbg)
Wednesday, 30. October 2024	Reviewing (jbg)
Friday, 01. November 2024	Homework Due	Syntax
Monday, 04. November 2024	Question Answering (jbg)
Wednesday, 06. November 2024	Writing a Paper (jbg)
Friday, 08. November 2024 [Shavuos]	Homework Due	Paper Review
Monday, 11. November 2024	Midterm Review (TA)
Wednesday, 13. November 2024	Midterm (TA)
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	Multimodal (jbg)
Wednesday, 27. November 2024	Thanksgiving
Monday, 02. December 2024	Annotation (nhf)
Wednesday, 04. December 2024	Careers in NLP / AUA
Friday, 06. December 2024	Homework Due	Poster
Monday, 09. December 2024	Poster day

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