CS 124: From Languages to Information

Welcome to CS124!! Some FAQ

Is the course in person for every class? Not exactly! CS124 is a flipped class! In Hewlett 200 there will be 2 in-person lectures (the very first "Intro" lecture and the very last "Outro" lecture), 5 in-person "group work" sessions, and 3 in-person tutorials. These 10 class sessions will be in the classroom. The rest of the lectures are all prerecorded and on canvas. The two "midterm reviews" will be online, and the midterms themselves are online. The remaining 6 days that are neither one of the 10 in-person lectures/tutorials/group works, nor one of the 2 midterms or 2 midterm reviews, will be special in-person group office hours in the classroom .

Wait, do I need to come to class? And can I take this class asynchronously, i.e., if i have another class at the same time?


The class must be taken synchronously, so that you have the ability to come to all the 10 in-person class sessions; we have found over the years that the group works and group discussions are necessary and result in everyone learning more. But the 10 class sessions are treated differently. The Intro and Outro lectures are required to be attended, as is the first group work. But showing up for the other 4 group works and the 3 tutorial sessions are technically optional, meaning that I won't take roll. However, you still must do the 5 group works even if you don't come those days, and I strongly recommend that you come in person. To emphasize this, we'll give extra credit for coming to the two required lectures and the 5 group works (but not for the tutorials, come to those if you need the info or want to help other students).

However, if you have a medical reason why you cannot take the class synchronously, or because you are required to take another class at the same time and must take the class for a requirement or else you cannot graduate this quarter, you can ask Dan for explicit permission to take the class asynchronously. The in-person material is not recorded, so if you are taking the class asynchronously, you must do the group work yourself at home, but won't get the extra credit that the folks who come in person will get. (You have 24 hours to take the midterm, so that's not an issue). Note: this is only for people with medical or must-graduate-this-quarter excuses.

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 or Math 51, but not required; we'll try to give you pointers to places to make up missing background.

Can I take this course as a non-CS grad student?: Yes, although this course is not appropriate for CS grad students (there are graduate versions of all the material in this course), it's very commonly taken by PhD students in the social sciences or humanities who plan to use text processing methods in their research.

More details? below. You are responsible for reading this entire syllabus before the 2nd day of class, January 12! (Note that the deadlines for PAs and quizzes are regular until the first midterm, after which I give you a bit of extra time.) Also note that there is no textbook, we will be using free online pdf chapters mostly here

Who do I email if I have questions? Email the course management staff here (this includes Dan and the head TA and the course manager and coordinator), including about missing classes, or about personal issues like OAE: cs124_requests@lists.stanford.edu

Most important: Have fun and learn lots!!!!

Logistics

Instructor

Dan Jurafsky (jurafsky@stanford.edu)
Office: Margaret Jacks 117
Office Hours: Tuesdays 4:30-5:50 after class. I'm going to try an experiment with individual one-at-a-time in-person office hours, where we have a 10 minute slot and take a walk outside. It will be right after class on Tuesdays, and let's try starting outside my office, which is Margaret Jacks 117!

TA Office Hours

• Online office hours: Rotating Time TBD
• In-person office hours:
  • Tuesdays 12:00noon to 1:20pm, Sapp Center Rm104
  • Wednesdays 7:00pm to 10:00pm, Hewlett 101
  • Fridays 1:00-2:30pm, Hewlett 103
  • Extra in-class office hours: In Hewlett 200 during class timeslot 3:00-4:20pm: Jan 26, Feb 2, Feb 9, Feb 21, Feb 28
  • Extra after-class office hours: in Room TBD from 4:30-5:30 : Jan 26, Feb 2, Feb 9

Class Time

Tuesday and Thursday 3:00-4:20

Attendance

We require you come to the 2 live lectures and strongly strongly recommend the 5 in-person group works, you will learn more from doing them with other people (I won't require attendance at the group works but I will give extra credit for attending). For any group work in-person class you miss, you must still do them at home yourself. The course can be taken asynchronously only if you have permission from Dan due to a required conflict or medical issue. Also: different people learn better from different combinations of videos/lectures, reading the chapters, coming to the live group exercises in Hewlett 200, and coming to office hours. But I will say that students who do all five tend to do the best on the exams and in the course in general.

Email

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_requests@lists.stanford.edu If you have a matter to be discussed privately, come to office hours or use cs124_requests@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.

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 to interfere in any way with programming assignment scoring or tampering with the submit script. It's also an honor code violation to use ChatGPT or any automatic coding system to write your code for you.

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.

Textbooks

• There is no required textbook, but I'll expect you to know the textbook/reading material listed above, and will test it on the midterms.
  • Online new chapters from Jurafsky and Martin. third edition in progress. Speech and Language Processing.
  • Chapters from Manning, Raghavan, and Schutze. 2008. Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press. You can buy the book, get it from the library, or it's also available online *HERE*.

Course Description

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.

Prerequisites

CS106B. CS 107 can be helpful, but is fine if you haven't had it, we'll cover the required UNIX material. Math 51 can also be helpful, but isn't required, since we will introduce the basic vectors knowledge we need in the class.

Required Work

Prerecorded Video Lectures

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.

In class Lectures

2 lectures will be live, and are required!

In-class group problem-solving

5 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 can't make a particular in-person group work, you must still do the exercises at home instead. Group work 1 is required to be attended in-class. Previous students who did well in the class have reported that doing the group exercises in-class have been extremely useful.

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. 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 Friday 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).

Class Participation

You have to watch all lectures, and attendance for the 2 live lectures is required. 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 5 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 PA7.

Programming Assignments

7 Python programming assignments. PA 1-4 are due at 5:00pm on the Friday it is due; PA5 and PA6 are due on Tuesdays, still at 5:00pm. PA7 is back to Friday.

Programming Assignment Collaboration for PA 1-6: 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 1-6. 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 7: PA7 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 7, 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.

Late homeworks

You have 4 free late (calendar) days to use on programming assignments 1-6. 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 7. 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.

Readings

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.

Final grade computation

• 64% homeworks (PAs 1-6 are each worth the same, 8% (ignore the different point values for each homework). PA7 is worth 16%, double the others)
• 10% Midterm 1
• 10% Midterm 2
• 16% weekly review quizzes

Final letter grades

• Some sort of A: 90% and above of the total points (the numerator will include your extra credit, the denominator does not include possible extra credit (otherwise it wouldn't be extra credit))
• Some sort of B: 80% and above
• Some sort of C: 70% and above