It is strongly recommended to take the class synchronously, and to come to the 6 in-person class sessions; we have found over the years that working in groups is pedagogically really useful and results in everyone learning more. Because of this strong recommendaiton we will give extra credit to everyone who comes to the 2 lectures and 4 group works.
However, if you absolutely need to take the class asynchronously, either because of COVID concerns or because
you need to take another class at the same time, you may. We'll make this possible by
recording the Intro and Outro lectures to be watched asynchronously.
We can not record the 4 group works, so if you are taking the class asynchronously,
you will be required to do the group work yourself at home, but won't get the extra credit that the folks who come in person will get.
But I'll make sure you have sufficient other opportunities for extra credit to make up for it!!!
And we will schedule alternate midterm times for students who can't take the midterm synchronously.
Does this class have an enrollment cap?
No, everyone will be admitted (some years Axess messes up, but always gets fixed eventually)
Is 106B the only prereq? Do I need 109 or 221 before I take CS124? :
106B is the only prereq. Taking the course as a sophomore is recommended, but we also
get lots of juniors and a reasonable number of frosh; the course is designed to be taken early in your Stanford career. It will help if you have at least done some programming beyond 106B, and is also useful to have had 107, but not required.
Textbook? None, we'll use free online pdf chapters mostly here
More details? below. You are responsible for reading this entire syllabus before the 2nd day of
class, Sep 23! Note that the deadlines for PAs and quizzes are regular until the first midterm, after which I give you a bit of extra time.
Most important: Have fun and learn lots!!!!
| Week | Date | Homework | Quiz | In-class | Video Lectures and Readings (to be done by the Friday of the week unless I specify an earlier date) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sep 21, 23 |
PA 0: Setup and Tutorial [starter code] Due Fri Sep 24, 5:00pm (Ungraded/optional; if you're having trouble, we'll go over this in Tuesday's tutorial on Nooks) | - |
|
Edit Distance Canvas Videos (watch videos before Monday Sep 27) [slides pptx] [slides pdf] |
| 2 | Sep 28 and 30 |
PA 1: Spamlord [starter code] Due Fri Oct 1, 5:00pm |
Quiz 1: Text Processing/Edit Distance [gradescope] Due Tue Sep 28, 11:59pm |
|
Language Modeling Canvas Videos (watch before Monday Oct 5) [Week 2 videos] [slides pptx] [slides pdf]
Naive Bayes and Text Classification Canvas Videos (watch before Tuesday Oct 5) [slides pptx] [slides pdf]
|
| 3 | Oct 5 and 7 |
PA 2: Triage and Sentiment (NB+LR)! [starter code] Due Fri Oct 8, 5:00pm |
Quiz 2: Language Modeling/Naive Bayes/Regression [gradescope] Due Tuesday Oct 5, 11:59pm |
(watch NB videos beforehand) (don't look at the solution until you've completed all the questions!) [group work 2] [solutions] [attendance form]
|
Chris Manning Canvas Video: Information Retrieval (I) (watch/read before Monday Oct 11)
[Week 3 videos]
[slides pptx]
[slides pdf]
|
| 4 | Oct 12 and 14 |
PA 3: Information Retrieval [starter code] Due Fri Oct 15, 5:00pm |
Quiz 3: Information Retrieval [gradescope] Due Tuesday Oct 12, 11:59pm |
|
|
| 5 | Oct 19 and 21 |
PA 4: Quizlet! [starter code] Due Fri Oct 22, 5:00pm |
Quiz 4: Vector Semantics and Sequence Labelling [gradescope] Due Tue Oct 19, 11:59pm |
Tuesday: No Class Today
Thursday: No class: extra in-person office hours during class time in 420-040
|
|
| 6 | Oct 26 and 28 |
PA 5: Neural Networks [starter code] Due next week! Mon Nov 1, 10:00pm |
Quiz 5: Neural Networks [gradescope] Due Tue Oct 26, 11:59pm |
Tuesday: Review for First Midterm (online) Thursday: First Midterm (online) |
Additional (optional) reading for those looking for more on this topic!: |
| 7 | Nov 2 and 4 |
PA 5: Neural Networks Due Mon Nov 1, 10:00pm PA 6: Chat! [starter code] Due Tue Nov 16, 5:00pm |
Quiz 6: Chatbots [gradescope] Due Thu Nov 4, 11:59pm |
Tuesday: No class Thursday: No class: extra in-person office hours during class time in 420-040 |
Recommender systems and Collaborative Filtering Canvas videos
|
| 8 | Nov 9 and 11 | - |
Quiz 7: Recommendation Systems [gradescope] Due Thu Nov 11, 11:59pm |
Tuesday no class
Thursday Group Work 4: Smartphone Chatbots
|
Web graphs, Links, and PageRank (Canvas Videos)
|
| 9 | Nov 16 and 18 |
PA 6: Chat! Due Tues Nov 16, 5:00pm (NOT FRIDAY) |
Quiz 8: Pagerank [gradescope] Due Thurs Nov 18, 11:59pm |
Tuesday: No Class
Thursday: Live Lecture: NLP for Social Good [attendance form] |
Social Networks Canvas Videos
NLP for Social Good |
| 10 | Nov 30 and Dec 2 | - |
Quiz 9: Networks and Zipfs Law Due Tues Nov 30, 11:59pm |
Tuesday: Review for Second Midterm (online) Thursday: Second Midterm (online) |
|
Tuesday and Thursday 3:15-4:30
We recommend you come to the 2 live lectures and especially the 4 in-person group works, you will learn more from doing them with other people (and I will give extra credit for attending). However, if you wish, the course can be taken asynchronously. The 2 live lectures will be recorded so you can watch them later. And instead of doing the group works as a group, you can do them at home yourself. But you may, if you must, do all on your own asynchronously. Also: different people learn better from different combinations of videos/lectures, reading the chapters, coming to the live group exercises in 420-040, and coming to office hours. But I will say that students who do all four tend to do the best on the exams and in the course in general.
Alas, we can't reply to email sent to individual staff members. If you have a question that is not confidential or personal, post it on the Ed Discussion forum! Responses are quicker and you'll also be helping others with the same question! To contact the teaching staff directly, come see us in office hours! If that is not possible, you can also email (non-technical questions) to the course staff list, cs124-aut2122-staff@lists.stanford.edu. If you have a matter to be discussed privately, come to office hours or use cs124-aut2122-staff@lists.stanford.edu to make an appointment. For grading questions, please talk to us after class or during office hours.
Class announcements will be on Ed Discussion (although we will occasionally try Canvas and mailing lists). We will assume that everyone reads all announcements.
Since we occasionally reuse homeworks from previous years, we expect students not to copy, refer to, or look at the solutions in preparing their answers. It is an honor code violation to intentionally refer to a previous year's solutions. This applies both to the official solutions and to solutions that you or someone else may have written up in a previous year. It is also an honor code violation to find some way to look at the test set, or to interfere in any way with programming assignment scoring or tampering with the submit script.
Since quizzes are a form of assessment, students are not allowed to collaborate on completing quizzes. It is an honor code violation to discuss quiz questions with other students.
Extracting meaning, information, and structure from human language text, speech, web pages, social networks. Introducing methods (string algorithms, edit distance, language modeling, machine learning, logistic regression, neural networks, neural embeddings, inverted indices, collaborative filtering, PageRank), applications (chatbots, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, text classification, social networks, recommender systems), and ethical issues.
CS106B. CS 107 can be helpful, but is fine if you haven't had it, we'll cover the required UNIX material.
Most weeks, we will ask you to watch a set of video lectures (2 to 2.5 hours total). Most videos will have some in-video questions embedded in them, which you should answer. You are required to watch the videos but the embedded quizzes are not counted toward the final grade.
2 lectures will be live, we recommend you come! But they will be recorded and posted to Canvas afterwards for those who missed it, or for review for the midterms.
4 in-class sessions are for group problem-solving activities. The group works are required and will be tested on the quiz, meaning that if you are taking the class async and can't make the in-person group works, you must still do all 4 exercises at home instead. Previous students who did well in the class have reported that doing the group exercises in-class have been extremely useful.
After watching a week's video lectures, we will ask you to answer an open-notes, open-book review quiz (about 5 questions) on the content that you just learned. These quizzes are not timed, they are open book, and they may be attempted an infinite number of times. The questions, as well as the options for each question, are randomly selected from a larger pool each time you take a quiz. You will not see your quiz grade/correct answers until after the due date, but the system will take the the score from the last submission of all your infinitely-allowed submissions for the quiz. So if you worry you might have got something wrong, just submit another one! Review Quizzes for each week are due 11:59pm Tuesday of the following week (except that Quiz 6 and Quiz 7 are due on the Thursday instead of the Tuesday). There are no late days for review quizzes. We will drop your lowest scoring quiz (i.e. we will only count your best 8 of the 9 quizzes in your final grade).
You have to watch all lectures, but attendance for the 2 live lectures is optional. The group works are required and we will test material from them on the 2 midterms. however, attendance for group work sessions is only strongly recommended; you may do them yourself at home if you really cannot come to class. You can get extra credit for class participation and other things by:: Coming to the 2 live lectures and the 4 group works; helpful answers on the class forum, helping out other students in office hours or group work sessions, being the first person to find typos in the textbook (not counting bugs in figure or chapter numbering), speaking up in the group work sessions. Plus there will be extra credit problems on the two quizzes and also on PA6.
6 Python programming assignments. PA 1-4 are due at 5:00pm on the Friday it is due; PA5 and PA6 are due on different weekdays, still at 5:00pm.
Programming Assignment Collaboration for PA 1-5: You may talk to anybody you want about the assignments and bounce ideas off each other. And if you want, you can also choose a partner and do pair programming for PA 1-5. You and your pair-partner can discuss code, but it's important that each of you work on each part of the assignment so that you're comfortable with the whole assignment, since assignments build on each other (and we will test concepts from the assignments on the midterms). If you choose to pair-program, each of you must still submit your own program, and should specify in the submission who your partner is. We will use the normal automatic checks for overlap between your code and other students' code who are not your pair partner.
Programming Assignment Collaboration for PA 6: PA6 is a group homework that must be done in groups. You will work together with your group, and write code together. Groups must be of size 3 or 4. To work in a group of size 2, you must get special permission from the staff. You cannot work by yourself on PA 6, because part of the goal of this homework is to learn to work on group projects. You must describe in your writeup who worked on which parts of the assignment/code.
You have 4 free late (calendar) days to use on programming assignments 1-5. If you are pair programming, late days are still individual (i.e if one of you has used up late days, and one has not, and you submit a homework late one day, only the student without remaining late days will be penalized). You cannot use late days on PA 6. Once late days are exhausted, any PA turned in late will be penalized 20% per late day. Each 24 hours or part thereof that a homework is late uses up one full late day. However, no assignment will be accepted more than four days after its due date.
This class has a significant amount of textbook reading. Most weeks have around 25 textbook pages. The homeworks and exams will be based heavily on the readings.