Course Outline
Schedule is subject to change
| Week | Date | Lecture | Assignment | Assignment Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 08/24 | Class Overview/Intro to NLP | HW0 (Self-Assessment) | 08/29 (11:59pm) |
| 1 | 08/26 | Linguistics in the Age of AI | ||
| 2 | 08/31 | Information Theory and Evaluation | ||
| 2 | 09/02 | Bayes’ Theorem, Naive Bayes Classification for Sentiment Analysis (recorded lecture, instructor travel) | ||
| 3 | 09/07 | No class (Labor Day) | ||
| 3 | 09/09 | N-gram Modeling | ||
| 4 | 09/14 | From Naive Bayes to Logistic Regression | ||
| 4 | 09/16 | Edit Distance, Model Training Using Gradient Descent | PA1 (Logistic Regression) | 09/25 (11:59pm) |
| 5 | 09/21 | Context-free grammars | In-class activity (N-gram Modeling) | 09/21 |
| 5 | 09/23 | Hidden Markov Models | ||
| 6 | 09/28 | Viterbi Algorithm, Graphical Models and CRFs | ||
| 6 | 09/30 | Part-of-speech Tagging with Structured Perceptrons | Project Proposal | 10/28 (11:59pm) |
| 7 | 10/05 | Annotation and the MATTER Cycle | PA2 (POS Tagger) | 10/12 (11:59pm) |
| 7 | 10/07 | Intro to Neural Networks for NLP | In-class activity (HMM) | 10/07 |
| 8 | 10/12 | Distributional Semantics and word2vec | ||
| 8 | 10/14 | CNNs in NLP | PA3 (Distributional Semantics) | 10/21 (11:59pm) |
| 9 | 10/19 | RNNs in NLP | ||
| 9 | 10/21 | LSTMs and Attention Mechanisms | ||
| 10 | 10/26 | Transformers | ||
| 10 | 10/28 | Transformers: Revenge of the Networks | PA4 (Neural Parser) | 11/04 (11:59pm) |
| 11 | 11/02 | Mega Encoder vs. Giant Decoder | ||
| 11 | 11/04 | RLHF: LLMs is People! | ||
| 12 | 11/09 | Offline Preference Optimization: Your Language Model Is Secretly a Reward Model | PA5 (Attention Mechanism) | 11/16 (11:59pm) |
| 12 | 11/11 | Reasoning Models: They Think Therefore They Am | ||
| 13 | 11/16 | Agentic AI: Why Do Anything Yourself? | PA6 (Reward Modeling) | 12/02 (11:59pm) |
| 13 | 11/18 | |||
| 14 | 11/23 | No classes (Fall break) | ||
| 14 | 11/25 | No classes (Fall break) | ||
| 15 | 11/30 | Scaling Laws: All Hail LLMs! | ||
| 15 | 12/02 | How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Large Language Models | ||
| 16 | 12/07 | Ethical and Social Issues in NLP | ||
| 16 | 12/09 | Final Project Lightning Presentations | ||
| 17 | 12/14 | No class (Finals week – no final exam) | ||
| 17 | 12/16 | No class (Finals week – no final exam) | Projects due |
