CMSC 470

Logistics

Location	CSIC 2117
Q & A	Mon. 15:30 - 16:45pm
Workshop	Wed. 15:30 - 16:45pm
Webpage	http://umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/teaching/CMSC_470/
Homework Submission	https://www.gradescope.com/courses/670788
Mailing List	http://piazza.com/umd/fall2025/cmsc470
Text	Speech and Natural Language Processing
Syllabus	https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lrCYFd20FYuwSi7Zrhj-Zqk4QotFFnJT92sxdN67z8M/edit?usp=sharing

People

Professor

Jordan Boyd-Graber
IRB 4146
Office Hours (IRB 4146 / Online): By appointment

Teaching Assistants

Zongxia Li
Wichayaporn "Joy" Wongkamjan

Schedule

Date	In-Class Topic	Assignment Due
Wednesday, 03. September 2025	What the class is about?
	Videos: Welcome to NLP What's a word? What's a language? How to read this webpage How to take a class with me More on the Flipped Classroom Hybrid classes Grader Expectations Readings: Linguistic Fundamentals for Natural Language Processing: 100 Essentials from Morphology and Syntax (Chapters 1 and 2) Alternate Link Optional Readings: Python (and programming) introductory course Jon Hewitt's Math Notes First weeks of INST 414 as review A probability primer Grinstead and Snell, Chapters 1-2, Chapter 4.1 How the statistical revolution changes (computational) linguistics The deep learning revolution in NLP
Friday, 05. September 2025	Homework Due	Warmup
Monday, 08. September 2025	AI vs. NLP
	Videos: What's the difference between NLP, AI, and ChatGPT? What made generative AI possible What to call these models? Shannon Game Evaluating Language Models The Turing Test Optional Review: What are expectations and entropy? administrivia Why you shouldn't use generative AI to cheat in my class Readings: Language Models: A Guide for the Perplexed
Wednesday, 10. September 2025	Tokenization

Friday, 12. September 2025	Homework Due	Tokenization
Monday, 15. September 2025	Information Retrieval
	Videos: The Cranfield Paradigm What is information retrieval? TF-IDF Evaluation Readings: IR Chapter 1, 6 Evolution of Cranfield (Optional)
Wednesday, 17. September 2025	Logistic Regression
	Videos: Regression Logistic Regression Stochastic Gradient Descent Feature Engineering in the Age of Deep Learning Feature Engineering for Quiz Bowl Readings: ['SNLP Chapter 5']
Friday, 19. September 2025	Homework Due	IR
Monday, 22. September 2025	Syntax
	Videos: What's a part of speech, and why is it a joint problem? Hidden Markov Modeling Inferring a Hidden Markov Model from Labeled Data Dependency parsing Readings: ['SNLP Chapter 8 (more important), 18 (less important)'] optional_lectures Viterbi Algorithm Shift-Reduce Parser
Wednesday, 24. September 2025 [Rosh Hashana]	Workshop: Evaluation / Development

Friday, 26. September 2025	Homework Due	Logistic Regression
Monday, 29. September 2025	Homework Framework
	Videos: Advice / Overview How to stump a computer Good questions Bad questions optional_videos IRT optional_past_finals 2019 Finals 2022 Finals
Wednesday, 01. October 2025	Word representations
	Videos: Distributional Semantics Word2Vec Evaluation Readings: ['SNLP Chapter 6']
Friday, 03. October 2025	Homework Due	Adam
Monday, 06. October 2025	Language Models

Wednesday, 08. October 2025 [Succos]	Workshop: Feature Engineering

Friday, 10. October 2025 [Succos]	Homework Due	Feature Engineering
Monday, 13. October 2025 [Succos]	Pytorch
	Videos: Deep Backprop Frameworks Pytorch DAN Readings: SNLP Chapter 7
Wednesday, 15. October 2025 [Simchas Torah]	Linear neural language models
	Videos: RNN for Sentiment RNN for LM LSTM Sequence models in Pytorch Readings: SNLP 9
Friday, 17. October 2025	Homework Due	DAN
Monday, 20. October 2025	Transformers
	Videos: Contextual Neural Language Models Overview Transformer Encoder BERTology Decoder Implementation Details Readings: ['SNLP 7'] The Annotated Transformer ['SNLP 9-9.3.3']
Wednesday, 22. October 2025	Decoding

Friday, 24. October 2025	Homework Due	LM
Monday, 27. October 2025	Finetuning

Wednesday, 29. October 2025 [Shavuos]	Alignment
	Videos: Fine-tuning, prompting, and how they relate to NLP RL Review Alignment Policy Gradient RLHF Readings: Open Problems and Fundamental Limitations of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback optional_videos UG Research at UMD on Prompting
Monday, 03. November 2025	Midterm Review

Wednesday, 05. November 2025	Midterm I

Friday, 07. November 2025	Homework Due	Transformer
Monday, 10. November 2025	Question Answering Approaches
	Videos: Dense Retrieval BERT for MRQA Multihop Generation for QA Conversational QA Long QA Readings: MRC Literature Review
Wednesday, 12. November 2025	Question Answering Datasets
	Videos: How question answering saved civilization The Turing Test Watson on Jeopardy! QA Datasets Cranfield vs. Manchester Readings: ['SNLP 23']
Friday, 14. November 2025	Homework Due	Finetuning
Monday, 17. November 2025	Question Answering Evaluation

Wednesday, 19. November 2025	Item Response Theory

Friday, 21. November 2025	Homework Due	Alignment
Monday, 24. November 2025	Adversarial Examples / Red Teaming

Wednesday, 26. November 2025	Thanksgiving
Monday, 01. December 2025	Machine translation
	Videos: Translation is Hard Word-based Translation Phrase-based Translation Neural Machine Translation Decoding Evaluation Readings: NMT Book (Chapter 5)
Wednesday, 03. December 2025	Computational Social Science

Friday, 05. December 2025	Homework Due	Adversarial Authoring
Monday, 08. December 2025	Midterm II

Wednesday, 10. December 2025	Ask Me Anything
	Videos: Course Evals You got a PhD in Computational Linguistics ... what now? Optimizing ML for Society How far off were my predictions? and p(Doom)
Friday, 12. December 2025	Homework Due	Prompt Optimization

Natural Language Processing (CMSC 470)

Logistics

People

Professor

Teaching Assistants

Schedule