CS224U: Natural Language Understanding

Your grade is determined based on:

• Participation: 5%
• Homeworks and bake-offs: 30%
• Literature review: 10%
• Experimental protocol: 15%
• Video presentation of project: 10%
• Final project paper: 30%

The letter grade policy is detailed below.

The participation grade has subjective elements but will be based largely on data we gather from the discussion forum and viewership numbers for the class meetings (with equal weight given to participating live and watching the recorded lectures). We will also consider other kinds of interaction you have with members of the teaching team, in offices hours, by email, etc.

Our goals for the homeworks and bake-offs: (i) to raise important questions, (ii) to exemplify best-practices for NLU experiments, and (iii) to help you master central NLU concepts.

The homeworks and bake-offs come in pairs and follow a common pattern:

1. In the homework, you build some baseline models and develop your own model, and this accounts for 9 of the 10 points.
2. In the associated bake-off, you enter your model into a competition centered around evaluation on a previously unseen test set. All entries get the additional homework point, and top entries receive a bit of extra credit. Precisely what it means to be a top entry might vary a bit by bake-off.

Policies:

• All homeworks must be submitted by 4:30 pm on the day they are due. Bake-offs launch in class that day (always a Monday) and close at 4:30 on that Wednesday.
• Collaboration on weekly assignments and bake-offs is permitted, with a maximim group size of 3.
• All the homeworks culminate in an "original system" question that becomes your bake-off entry. Grading these is more subjective than it is for the other assignment questions. Here are the basic guidelines we will adopt for grading:
  1. Any system that performs extremely well on the bake-off data will be given full credit, even systems that are very simple. We can't argue with success according to our own metrics!
  2. Systems that are very creative and well-motivated will be given full credit even if they do not perform well on the bake-off data. We want to encourage creative exploration!
  3. Other systems will receive less than full credit, based on the judgment of the teaching team. The specific criteria will vary based on the nature of the assignment. Point deductions will be justified in feedback.

1. Each student will have a total of 4 free late (calendar) days applicable to any assignment (including the lit review and project milestone) except the final project paper. Final project papers cannot be turned in late under any circumstances.
2. Free late days can be used at any time, no questions asked. Each 24 hours or part thereof that a homework is late uses up one full late day. Once these late days are exhausted, any homework turned in late will be penalized 10% per late day.
3. If a group's assignment is late n days, then each group member is charged n late days.
4. Late days are never transferrable between students, even students in the same group.
5. There is no penalty for turning in bake-off entries late, and late bake-off entries do not use up late days. However, late bake-off entries cannot win and thus are not eligible for the extra credit that comes from winning.
6. All late work must be turned in by June 9, 11:59 pm.

For details, see the final projects page.

On the one hand, we want to encourage you to pursue unified interdisciplinary projects that weave together themes from multiple classes. On the other hand, we need to ensure that final projects for this course are original and involve a substantial new effort.

To try to meet both these demands, we are adopting the following policy on joint submission: if your final project for this course is related to your final project for another course, you are required to submit both projects to us by our final project due date. If we decide that the projects are too similar, your project will receive a failing grade. To avoid this extreme outcome, we strongly encourage you to stay in close communication with us if your project is related to another you are submitting for credit, so that there are no unhappy surprises at the end of the term. Since there is no single objective standard for what counts as "different enough", it is better to play it safe by talking with us.

Fundamentally, we are saying that combining projects is not a shortcut. In a sense, we are in the same position as professional conferences and journals, which also need to watch out for multiple submissions. You might have a look at the ACL/NAACL policy, which strives to ensure that any two papers submitted to those conferences make substantially different contributions – our goal here as well.

Please familiarize yourself with Stanford's honor code. We will adhere to it and follow through on its penalty guidelines.

From Stanford's Office of Accessible Education:

Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). Professional staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, and prepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the request is being made. Students should contact the OAE as soon as possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone: 723-1066, URL: http://oae.stanford.edu).

This is the system we will use at the end of the quarter to map numerical final grades to letter grades: