CS 124: From Languages to Information

Online Offering

From Languages to Information is offered online!

What this means:

• We have recorded most of the lectures on video, and you can watch them at home. The weekly review exercises and the (Java or Python) programming homeworks will be automatically uploaded and graded. Lecture, online exercises, and homeworks will be available on Coursera.
• The in-class sessions, Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:15-4:30pm in 420-040, will be used for activities, problem-solving, reviews, discussions, guest speakers from industry, and presentation of state-of-the-art research.
• Some of the in-class sessions are mandatory. This includes the regular introductory lecture on Tuesday, January 7, 2014, which you should all attend, as this material will motivate the rest of the course, as well as the lecture on March 11, and all the guest lectures. The required lectures are marked with a * and in boldface on the syllabus below. And there will likely be one or two more lectures delivered live rather than on video.

Schedule

Course Information

Logistics

Instructor

Dan Jurafsky (jurafsky@stanford.edu)
Office: Margaret Jacks 117
Office Hours: Tuesdays 2-3 or by appointment

Teaching Assistants

Samuel Bowman
Milind Ganjoo
Victoria Kwong
Ashish Mathew
Suril Shah
Natalia Silveira

TA Office Hours

• Tuesdays 1:15 to 3:00 p.m.
• Wednesdays 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. (Group Coding Session)
• Thursdays 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

TA Office

Huang 203 (plus Huang 219 for overflow), except that Tues Feb 11th and Thur Mar 6 we'll be in Huang 218 instead of 203.

Class Time

Tuesday and Thursday 3:15-4:30pm in 420-040

Email

If you have a question that is not confidential or personal, post it on the Piazza forum - responses tend to be quicker and have a wider audience. To contact the teaching staff directly, we strongly encourage you to come to office hours. If that is not possible, you can also email (non-technical questions only) to the course staff list, cs124-win1314-staff@lists.stanford.edu. We can not reply to email sent to individual staff members. If you have a matter to be discussed privately, please come to office hours, or use cs124-win1314-staff@lists.stanford.edu to make an appointment. For grading questions, please talk to us after class or during office hours.

We use the mailing list generated by Axess to convey messages to the class. We will assume that all students read these messages.

Honor Code

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 interfere in any way with programming assignment scoring or tampering with the submit script.

Textbooks

• Required: Jurafsky and Martin. 2009. Speech and Language Processing (2nd Edition). Pearson
• Recommended: Manning, Raghavan, and Schutze. 2008. Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press.

Readings from MR+S are required, but the book is available online *HERE*.

Course Description

Extracting meaning, information, and structure from human language text, speech, web pages, genome sequences, social networks, or any less structured information. Methods include: string algorithms, edit distance, language modeling, naive Bayes, inverted indices, vector semantics. Applications such as information retrieval, question answering, text classification, social network models, machine translation, genomic sequence alignment, word meaning extraction.

Prerequisites

CS 103, CS 107 and CS 109.

Required Work

Video Lectures

Each week, we will ask you to watch a set of video lectures (2 to 2.5 hours total). The 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.

Automated Review Quizzes

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. Each review quiz may be attempted several times, with a time lag of 10 minutes in between each attempt. The questions, as well as the options for each question, are randomly selected from a larger pool each time you take a quiz. We will take the highest score over all attempts for each quiz. The first two attempts will not be penalized; subsequent attempts will incur a cumulative 20% penalty (e.g., the maximum score possible is 80% on the 3rd attempt and 60% on the 4th attempt). Review Quizzes for each week are due 11:59pm Tuesday of the following week. There are no late days for review quizzes.

Class Participaton

Since lectures are on-line, the in-class sessions Tuesday and Thursday mornings will be used for problem-solving, reviews, discussions, guest speakers from industry, and presentation of state-of-the-art research. Attendence at the guest lectures as well as the first lecture, my lecture on networks, and possibly one other in-person lecture is required (this is the 5% class participation part of your grade). You can get extra credit for class participation by answering questions on the class forum and asking good question of the invited speakers.

Programming Assignments

6 programming assignments (in Java or Python, your choice). Each assignment is due at 5:00pm on the Friday it is due.

Programming Assignment Collaboration: You may talk to anybody you want about the assignments and bounce ideas off each other. But you must write the actual programs yourself.

Late homeworks

You have 4 free late (calendar) days to use on the first 5 programming assignments (HW 6 is a peer-graded assignment, and late days may not be applied). Once these 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.

Readings

We will expect you to do a significant amount of textbook reading in this course.

Final exam: You can take the final either of these two days (but not both)

Tuesday Mar 18, 12:15pm-3:15pm Location: Hewlett 201
Thursday Mar 20, 12:15pm-3:15pm Location: CUBAUD (Cubberley Auditorium)

Final grade

• 57% homeworks
• 29% final exam
• 9% weekly review quizzes
• 5% attendance and participation