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Prerequisites, course selection, enrollment
Prerequisites All of the following: CS 2110 or equivalent programming experience; a course in artificial intelligence or any relevant subfield (e.g., NLP, information retrieval, machine learning); proficiency with using machine learning tools (e.g., fluency at training an SVM, knowledge of how to assess a classifier’s performance using cross-validation)
Enrollment CS/IS PhD students may enroll online. Other students interested in adding the course, (wel)come to the first day of class. Enrollment questions will be addressed then, when we have a better sense of what the demand is and how many CS/IS PhD students are interested in taking the class.
Choosing among NLP courses: How do I know which one is right for me?
In 2015-2016, we are blessed with a plethora of NLP-related offerings!
At the graduate level:
If you are interested in extracting information and meaning from text through machine learning techniques, then consider taking CS6740/IS6300, Advanced Language Technologies (offered Spring 2016. To get a feel for that the course will be like, see the Fall 2012 offering).
If you are interested in studying formal representation of language meaning, and designing algorithms to learn to map sentences to such representations, then consider taking CS6741, Structured Prediction for Natural Language Processing (offered Fall 2015).
All three courses fulfill the same CS graduate course requirements. If you are truly passionate about NLP research, we would love to see you in all of these courses!
Email: please send a single email with both instructors' emails in the To: line. This ensures that the entire course staff knows what's going on and can contribute to student inquiries
Overview of course schedule. Details subject to change. Full schedule is maintained on the main course webpage.
Lecture
Agenda
Pedagogical purpose
Assignments
#1
Course overview
A1 released: pilot empirical study for a research idea based on the given readings.
#2 - #4
Lecture topics related to the A1 readings: Online reviews: individual expression, community dynamics; Online asynchronous conversations.
Case studies to explore some topics and research styles find interesting. Get-to-know-you exercises to get everyone familiar and comfortable with each other.
Next 6 meetings, not counting presentations or discussions
Lectures on, potentially, linguistic coordination, linguistic adaptation, influence, persuasion, diffusion, discourse structure, advanced language modeling
Foundational material
Potentially some assignments based on the lectures.
Next large block of meetings
Dicussion of proposed projects based on the readings
Practice with fast research-idea generation. Feedback as to what proposals are most interesting, most feasible, etc.
Discussion of student project proposals, based on the readings for that class meeting. Each class meeting thus involves everyone reading at least one of the two assigned papers and posting a new research proposal based on the reading to Piazza.
Thoughtfulness and creativity are most important to , but take feasibility into account.
Remainder of the course
Activities related to course projects
Development of a "full-blown" research project (although time restrictions may limit ambitions). For our purposes, "interesting" is more important than "thorough".
Some time in December (to be determined by the registrar): final project writeup due
Grading Of most interest to is productive research-oriented discussion participation (in class and on Piazza), interesting research proposals and pilot studies, and a good-faith final research project.
Academic Integrity Academic and scientific integrity compels one to properly attribute to others any work, ideas, or phrasing that one did not create oneself. To do otherwise is fraud.
We emphasize certain points here. In this class, talking to and helping others is strongly encouraged. You may also, with attribution, use the code from other sources. The easiest rule of thumb is, acknowledge the work and contributions and ideas and words and wordings of others. Do not copy or slightly reword portions of papers, Wikipedia articles, textbooks, other students' work, Stack Overflow answers, something you heard from a talk or a conversation or saw on the Internet, or anything else, really, without acknowledging your sources. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6742/2011sp/handouts/ack-others.pdf and http://www.theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/AcadInteg/ for more information and useful examples.
This is not to say that you can receive course credit for work that is not your own — e.g., taking someone else's report and putting your name at the top, next to the other person(s)' names. However, violations of academic integrity (e.g., fraud) undergo the academic-integrity hearing process on top of any grade penalties imposed, whereas not following the rules of the assignment only risk grade penalties.
ACL anthology of all conferences, journals and workshops published under the aegis of the Association for Computational Linguistics; ACM digital library proceedings publication archive for WWW; AAAI proceedings archive for ICWSM
Bryan, Christopher J., Gregory M. Walton, Todd Rogers, and Carol S. Dweck. 2011. Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108 (31): 12653-12656.
Chong, Dennis and James N. Druckman. 2007. Framing theory. Annual Review of Political Science 10:103–26.
Taraborelli, Dario and Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia. Beyond notability. Collective deliberation on content inclusion in Wikipedia. Second international workshop on quality in techno-social systems, pp. 122-125. [alt link]
#2
Aug 27: Reviewing: a social experience?
Class images, links and handouts
Image source: Dorothy Gambrel, Cat and Girl. Permission policy here.
Reddit. Online thread visualizer by Kawandeep Virdee.
Datasets
UBC BC3 Blog Corpus: 7000 blog conversations with user-labeled comments from 6 popular websites (Slashdot, Macrumors, AndroidCentral, Dailykos, BusinessInsider, TSN). Slashdot includes "Funny" tags.
CORPS: corpus of political speeches tagged with specific audience reactions, such as APPLAUSE or LAUGHTER.
Yelp academic dataset. Includes "funny", "cool", "useful" tags, although not many of them.
HCRC Map Task Corpus: 128 dialogues recorded, transcribed, and annotated for a wide range of behaviours. It references other related corpora:
The DCIEM Map Task Corpus uses very similar materials to the HCRC Map Task Corpus, but with a different structure designed to test the effects of sleep deprivation under a number of pharmaceutical conditions. The subjects were Canadian army reservists.
The Map Task Corpus has been replicated in whole or in part in a number of languages including Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Occitan, andPortuguese. It has also been replicated in part for other forms of English besides the original Glaswegian speakers, including American English, Australian English, and some urban British dialects. The Occitan site has a list of some other language replications. The Map Task has been used to test the effects of many conditions on human communication, including stuttering, computer mediation, textual communication, and the use of avatars.
#5
Sep 8: Discourse "rules" and discourse structure
Class images, links and handouts
Image source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/49.70.33. "The image is one for which Picasso did a number of variations in Paris during the autumn–winter of 1912; in each version, a tall bottle and goblet are set out on a small round table."
We didn't talk about this in class, but centering theory is meant to account for phenomena like the focus of example 2 being the wine rather than the table.
Section 24.1.5 of Jurafsky, Daniel and James H. Martin. 2009. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing,
Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. 2nd edition. [chapter link at UCSC]
Pinker, Steven and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) Animate, posted to YouTube on Feb 10, 2011. Language as a Window into Human Nature
Section 24.7.2 of Jurafsky, Daniel and James H. Martin. 2009. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing,
Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. 2nd edition. [chapter link at UCSC]
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2012. The dynamic lexicon. Handbook of Laboratory Phonology. A. Cohen, M. Huffman, and C. Fougeron (eds). Oxford University Press.
Chapter on Structural Balance from Easley, David and Jon Kleinberg. 2010. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press.
#15
Oct 15: (Optional) Proposal consultation appointments
If you did not make an appointment for today, you do not need to come to class.
#16
Oct 20: (Mandatory) Feasibility presentations to the instructors
You should only come to class for your appointment slot, not for the whole class-meeting time.
#17
Oct 22:(Mandatory) Feasibility presentations to the instructors
You should only come to class for your appointment slot, not for the whole class-meeting time.
#18
Oct 27: Bayesian identification of features distinguishing two sub-languages
Assignments/announcements
CMS 2-minute “quiz” on LM background, due midnight on Tuesday the 27th: we want to get a feeling for what everyone's background in language modeling is. Your answers are purely for us to plan lecture (as you will see when you look at the possible answers).
The argument regarding variance for counts and normalized counts, and the use of a (different) probabilistic model to account for it, also appears in Kleinberg, Jon. 2004. Temporal dynamics of on-line information streams. In Data Stream Management: Processing High-speed Data Streams, to appear.
F. Jelinek, R.L. Mercer and S. Roukos. Principles of Lexical Language Modeling for Speech Recognition. Advances in Speech Signal Processing, S. Furui and J. Sondhi, Eds. M. Dekker Publishers, New York, NY 1991. Pp.651-700
Gale, William A. and Kenneth W. Church. 1994.What's wrong with adding one. Corpus-based Research Into Language: In Honour of Jan Aarts, pp. 189--200.
Note (new) upcoming check-up appointments, presentation and final-project due dates.
Class images, links and handouts
Flesch, Rudolf. June 1948.A new readability yardstick. Journal of Applied Psychology 32(3): 221-33. [Alternative link: the paper is bundled is the collection The Classic Readability Studies, ed. William H. DuBay. Published as Unlocking Language: The Classic Studies in Readability, BookSurge Publishing, 2007.
MRC Psycholinguistic database. Wilson, M.D. (1988) The MRC Psycholinguistic Database: Machine Readable Dictionary, Version 2. Behavioural Research Methods, Instruments and Computers, 20(1), 6-11. A search interface makes it clear what kind of features (annotations) are identified for the lexicon items.
Ritter, Alan, Colin Cherry, and Bill Dolan. 2010. Unsupervised modeling of Twitter conversations. In Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 172-180.
An example LCFRS is given in Burden, Håkan and Peter Ljunglöf. 2005. Parsing linear context-free rewriting systems. The Ninth International Workshop on Parsing Technology (IWPT), 11-17.
Chen, Harr, S. R. K. Branavan, Regina Barzilay, and David R. Karger. 2009. Content modeling using latent permutations. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 36(1): 129-163.
Joshi, Aravind K. and Yves Schabes. Tree-adjoining grammars. In Grzegorz Rozenberg and Arto Salomaa, editors, Handbook of Formal Languages, volume 3 (Beyond words), pp. 69–123 (1997). [alt link]
By 3pm the afternoon before your progress-and-problems appointment day, post a Piazza followup to your proposal that summarizes your progress and what discussion points or problems you'd like to bring up with us. Ideally, this followup post will be the agenda for your team's appointment, and will make the meeting efficient and useful for you.
Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of english in new york city. In The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
#27
Dec 1: project presentations (mandatory attendance by all students for the whole session)
Assignments/announcements
Schedule has been emailed. We'll end slightly later than usual --- 11:30, but will make up for it by ending early next session.
#28
Dec 3: project presentations(mandatory attendance by all students for the whole session)
Assignments/announcements
Schedule has been emailed.
Final project description due: December 9, 4:30pm on CMS. (date determined by the registrar)
The main evaluation criteria will be the reasonableness (in approach and amount of effort), thoughtfulness, and creativity of what you tried, as documented in your writeup. Individual effort within team projects will be taken into account; see item 3 below.
We make this requirement to facilitate submission to ICWSM 2016. However, note that your final-project submission should have your names and acknowledgments included, in a particular format (see item 1c amd 2b below); in contrast, you will want to strip any identifying information for ICWSM submissions.
AAAI prefers non-numbered section headings. You may change the style files to include section numbers in your headings for the purposes of CS6742 submission.
For the author heading, list only the names of your teammates that are enrolled in the class, even if you had external collaborators. (Reason: only students in the class are submitting the paper for a grade.) But see item 2b1 below.
Include the following sections:
"content" sections: abstract, introduction/motivation, data description (how you gathered, cleaned, and processed it), methods, an experiments, related work, references, conclusions (what you learned), directions for future work.
Make sure that your introduction section explicitly sets out your hypothesis or hypotheses.
Throughout, highlight your most interesting findings (positive or negative).
For the purposes of CS6742 submission, your related-work section does not need to be exhaustive; you may cover just a few most-related papers.
An "acknowledgments" section: give the name and state the contribution of those who you received significant help from. (This may or may not include your advisor(s), one or both of your instructors, fellow students in the class).
Authorship statement: if you intend to ask or have already arranged to have people other than your CS6742-enrolled teammates, also name each such person.
Projects done collaboratively must also include a section describing who did what. External collaborators should be included in this enumeration.
Use the number of pages you feel is appropriate.
Code for generating the calendar formatting
adapted from the original versions created by
Andrew Myers.
Image source: Dorothy Gambrel, Cat and Girl. Permission policy here.
Lecture references