CS 6741: Topics in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning (Fall 2020)

The course schedule is adapted for both Ithaca and NYC calendars. The first class will be on September 2. Please see the schedule for details.

The Zoom link for the class is here.

Robust autonomous language reasoning has the potential to transform how we interact with computers and study language at scale. Building systems that understand and generate natural language provides avenues for both new applications and better understanding of language itself.

This is a research-first course. We will focus on a deep dive into 2–3 cutting-edge research topics through paper readings, presentations, and discussions. The course guidelines provide advice for our reading process. The topics for fall 2020 are, in order: (a) computational pragmatics, (b) cognitive science and NLP, and (c) language grounding. We will take a very broad view of these topics. The first part of the semester will be dedicated to reading and discussing papers with focus on computational pragmatics, and the second part to papers in the intersection of cognitive science and NLP. There will likely be significant overlap between these two topics. We will dedicate the third part of the semester to reading recent papers in language grounding, and discussing them through the lens of the two focus topics from the first parts of the semester. We will use a conference reviewing system to submit paper reviews. We will potentially also host invited speakers for talks.

The course will include a research project component due at the end of the semester. Throughout the semester, we will focus on reading, presenting, and discussing papers. The topic for the project will be determined in discussion between the student and the instructor to balance the student’s interests, current research, and the course topics. Students who already took the class in the past and wish to re-take it, may take the class without submitting a project for an S/U grade. This requires instructor permission, so please obtain it in advance.

This class is intended for both NYC and Ithaca PhD students. All non-PhD students require instructor permission to enroll. Unfortunately, we are only able to consider requests after the first day of the semester.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Aida Nematzadeh for many wonderful reading recommendations in the intersection of language and cognitive science, and to Alane Suhr for her inspiring list of readings in computational pragmatics.