COMP 4221/5221 - Spring 2019

Spring 2019, COMP 4221 Introduction to Natural Language Processing [3-0-1:3]
Spring 2019, COMP 5221 Natural Language Processing [3-0-0:3]
Lecture 1, TuTh 10:30-11:50, Rm 5619 (L31-32)
Prof. Dekai WU, Rm 3556, 2358-6989, dekai@cs.ust.hk

Tut 1A W 10:30-11:20, Rm 2407, L17-18

You are welcome to knock on the door of the instructor any time. The TA's office hours are posted at http://course.cs.ust.hk/comp4221/ta/.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Welcome to COMP4221 for UGs and COMP5221 for PGs! (The COMP4221 course was formerly called COMP300H and COMP326, and the COMP5221 course for PGs was formerly called COMP526.) Tutorials will begin in Week 2.

Always check the Discussion Forum for up-to-the-minute announcements.

Discussion forum is at http://comp151.cse.ust.hk/~dekai/content/?q=forum/3. Always read before asking/posting/emailing your question. You must register for your account at the first lecture, tutorial, or lab.
Course home page is at http://www.cs.ust.hk/~dekai/4221/.
Tutorial info is at http://course.cs.ust.hk/comp4221/ta/.

ORIENTATION

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Abbreviated Course Catalog Description

COMP 4221. Human language technology for text and spoken language. Machine learning, syntactic parsing, semantic interpretation, and context-based approaches to machine translation, text mining, and web search.

Course Description

Human language technology for processing text and spoken language. Fundamental machine learning, syntactic parsing, semantic interpretation, and context models, algorithms, and techniques. Applications include machine translation, web technologies, text mining, knowledge management, cognitive modeling, intelligent dialog systems, and computational linguistics.

TEXTBOOKS

HONOR POLICY

To receive a passing grade, you are required to sign an honor statement acknowledging that you understand and will uphold all policies on plagiarism and collaboration.

Plagiarism

All materials submitted for grading must be your own work. You are advised against being involved in any form of copying (either copying other people's work or allowing others to copy yours). If you are found to be involved in an incident of plagiarism, you will receive a failing grade for the course and the incident will be reported for appropriate disciplinary actions.

University policy requires that students who cheat more than once be expelled. Please review the cheating topic from your UST Student Orientation.

Warning: sophisticated plagiarism detection systems are in operation!

Collaboration

You are encouraged to collaborate in study groups. However, you must write up solutions on your own. You must also acknowledge your collaborators in the write-up for each problem, whether or not they are classmates. Other cases will be dealt with as plagiarism.

GRADING

Course grading will be adjusted to the difficulty of assignments and exams. Moreover, I guarantee you the following.

If you achieve 85% you will receive at least a A grade.
75% B
65% C
55% D

Your grade will be determined by a combination of factors:

Midterm exam ~20%
Final exam ~25%
Participation ~5%
Assignments ~50%

Examinations

No reading material is allowed during the examinations. No make-ups will be given unless prior approval is granted by the instructor, or you are in unfavorable medical condition with physician's documentation on the day of the examination. In addition, being absent at the final examination results in automatic failure of the course according to university regulations, unless prior approval is obtained from the department head.

There will be one midterm worth approximately 20%, and one final exam worth approximately 25%.

Participation

Science and engineering (including software engineering!) is about communication between people. Good participation in class and/or the online forum will count for approximately 5%.

Assignments

All assignments must be submitted by 23:00 on the due date. Scheme programming assignments must run under Chicken Scheme on Linux. Assignments will be collected electronically using the automated CASS assignment collection system. Late assignments cannot be accepted. Sorry, in the interest of fairness, exceptions cannot be made.

Programming assignments will account for a total of approximately 50%.

Tutorials

All information for tutorials is at http://course.cs.ust.hk/comp4221/ta/.

SYLLABUS

Date Wk Event Topic
 


2019.01.31 1 Lecture Welcome; Introduction; Survey
2019.02.05 1 Holiday Lunar New Year
2019.02.07 1 Holiday Lunar New Year
2019.02.12 2 Lecture Impact of AI on ethics and society
2019.02.13 2 Lecture Does God play dice? Assumptions: scientific method, hypotheses, models, learning, probability; linguistic relativism and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; inductive bias, language bias, search bias; the great cycle of intelligence [at tutorial]
2019.02.14 2 Lecture Languages of the world
Administrivia (honor statement, HKUST classroom conduct)
2019.02.19 3 Lecture Learning to translate: engineering, social, and scientific motivations
2019.02.20 3 Lecture "It's all Chinese to me": linguistic complexity; challenges in modeling translation [at tutorial]
2019.02.21 3 Lecture Is machine translation intelligent? Interactive simulation [at tutorial]
2019.02.26 4 Lecture Evaluating translation quality: alignment; aligning semantic frames: Interactive exercise
2019.02.27 4 Lecture Evaluating translation quality: HMEANT [at tutorial]
2019.02.28 4 Lecture Evaluating translation quality: MEANT
2019.03.05 5 Lecture Evaluating translation quality: semantic role labeling (SRL), case frames, semantic frames, predicate-argument structure
2019.03.06 5 Lecture Automatic semantic role labeling (ASRL) [at tutorial]
2019.03.07 5 Lecture Implementing a feedforward neural network based part-of-speech tagger Assignment 1 due 2019.03.15 23:59; context-independent POS tagging
2019.03.12 6 Lecture I/O representations for feedforward networks; context-dependent POS tagging
2019.03.13 6 Tutorial Basic probability theory; conditional probabilities; Bayes' theorem
2019.03.14 6 Lecture Example-based, instance-based, memory-based, case-based, analogy-based, lazy learning for classification; translation via nearest neighbors (NN); k-NN; weighted k-NN
2019.03.19 7 Exam Midterm (closed book; handwritten notebook only)
2019.03.21 7 Lecture Midterm review; machine translation techniques
2019.03.26 8 Lecture Learning vs performance components in machine learning; supervised learning; Word sense disambiguation; lexical choice; example-based prediction models; nearest neighbor classifiers; similarity metrics; kNN classifiers
2019.03.28 8 Lecture Exploring different feedforward neural network architectures for POS tagging; model design following scientific method for machine learning in practice Assignment 2 due 2019.04.10 23:59; AI ethics
2019.04.02 9 Lecture Naive Bayes classifiers for WSD and lexical choice
2019.04.04 9 Lecture Modern approaches to SRL; corporate responsibility in AI
2019.04.09 10 Lecture Implementing chunkers and shallow parsers via IOBES tagging plus a POS tagger Assignment 3 due 2019.05.10 23:59
2019.04.11 10 Lecture Chunking via IOBES representations; shallow bracketing
2019.04.16 11 Lecture Shallow syntactic parsing; shallow semantic parsing; language bias of IOBES representations, bags of words, and one-hot representations
2019.04.18 11 Lecture Introduction to word embeddings
2019.04.23 11 Lecture Vector space models; classic word vector approaches
2019.04.25 11 Lecture Learning word embeddings via prediction tasks; skip-grams; word2vec; Assignment 3 discussion
2019.04.30 12 Lecture Recursive autoencoders (RAEs) and recursive auto-associative memories (RAAM); learning word embeddings by making RAEs predict; AI ethics in China; utilitarian and consequentialist ethics; Asilomar AI principles
2019.05.02 12 Lecture Context-free grammars (CFGs); generative vs parsing models; top-down vs bottom-up parsing; dynamic programming based chart parsing; Cocke-Kasami-Younger (CKY) parsing
2019.05.07 13 Lecture From CFGs to ITGs (monolingual vs bilingual modeling); how bilingual conditions make grammar induction easier; the mystery of the magic number 4 in semantic frames; simple and full syntax-directed transduction grammars (SDTGs); introductioon to inversion transduction grammars (ITGs); tree vs matrix constituent alignment visualizations
2019.05.08 13 Lecture ITG characteristics; stochastic ITGs; polynomial-time transduction and learning; resolving the mystery of the magic number 4
2019.05.09 13 Lecture From RAAM to TRAAM (transduction RAAM); recursive neural network realizations of ITGs; a self-learning rap battle bot
2019.05.27 Exam Final (closed book; handwritten notebook only) LG1 Table Tennis Room (LG1031) 08:30-11:30


dekai@cs.ust.hk
Last updated: 2019.05.09