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CS 224N -- Ling 237: Natural Language Processing
Spring 2002
Handout #1: Course Information

Meeting Times and Locations

Lecture: 3-4 units, MW 12:50-2:05 Gates B12
Section: 0 units, W 5:00-6:00 380-380Y

The sections will work through concrete problems and examples of the sort that appear on homework and programming assignments, discuss solutions to questions, and provide necessary background in probability, corpora, and linguistics, as needed.  You are strongly encouraged to attend section for a better understanding of the course content.

Electronic Communications

Course web page:

http://cs224n.stanford.edu

Most of the useful information is here. Including the FAQ!

Newsgroup:

su.class.cs224n

This is intended for general discussion, assignment hints, people looking for partners, etc.

Announcement mailing lists:

cs224n-students@lists.stanford.edu

This list is intended for important announcements for all students. You will be automatically subscribed to this list when you enroll in the class..

cs224n-guests@lists.stanford.edu

If you are not formally enrolled in the class, you should subscribe to cs224n-guests to receive the same announcements. Send an email with “subscribe cs224n-guests” in the body to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu. If possible, please subscribe from a leland account, as this will allow you to access Stanford corpora, which will be necessary for assignments.

Questions mailing list:

cs224n-staff@lists.stanford.edu

Send your questions here! 

·        Note: For any regular questions about the course, use cs224n-staff@lists.stanford.edu to e-mail the instructors and the TA at once, rather than using the email addresses below. This will get you a quicker responses, and allow us to share work, and see what is going on.

·        Before sending questions, please check the website for Frequently Asked Questions.

·        We also encourage you to come to office hours, especially if you need detailed explanations of things.

·        We will endeavor to answer all questions sent via e-mail. However, we encourage you to read the whole question and to think about assignments and problems before sending email. You cannot expect to receive in time answers to questions sent less than 6 hours before the assignment due date.

·        We welcome comments and suggestions about the course and any mistakes we have made, mistakes in the book, etc.

Teaching Staff       

Professor: Christopher Manning
Office: Gates Bldg. Rm 418
Office Hours: Mon 2-3, Fri 10-11

Phone: (650) 723-7683
Fax: (650) 725-2588

E-mail: manning@cs.stanford.edu

Manning works primarily on systems that can intelligently process and produce human languages.  His interests include probabilistic models of language and statistical natural language processing, constraint-based theories of grammar, computational lexicography, syntax, and information extraction.

TA: Andrea Tompa
Office: Gates Bldg. Rm B26A
Office hours: Tue 5-6, Fri 11-12
Phone: (650) 723-6319 (during office hours only)
E-mail: atompa@stanford.edu

Course admin: Sara Weden
Office: Gates Bldg Rm 419
Phone: (650) 725-3358
Fax: (650) 725-2588
E-mail: sweden@db.stanford.edu

 

Course Objective

To get people to understand as much as possible about important ideas in NLP and recent work in NLP within one quarter.

Course Description

This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental concepts and ideas in natural language processing (NLP), and to get them up to speed with current research in the area. It develops an in-depth understanding of both the algorithms available for the processing of linguistic information and the underlying computational properties of natural languages. Word-level, syntactic, and semantic processing from both a linguistic and an algorithmic perspective are considered. The focus is on modern quantitative techniques in NLP: using large corpora, statistical models for acquisition, disambiguation, and parsing. Also, it examines and constructs representative systems.

Prerequisites

Intended Audience

Graduate students and advanced undergraduates specializing in computer science, linguistics, or symbolic systems.

Course Materials

The required text is

Please see http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/ for supplementary information about the text, including errata, and pointers to online resources.

As an additional optional text, you will also find in the bookstore

Additional handouts and papers will occasionally be distributed and discussed during the course of the class.

Copies of in-class hand-outs, such as homework assignments and problem set solutions, when available electronically, will be posted here, and hard copies will also be available in the "handout hangout" in Gates 1B while supplies last.

Hardware/Software Requirements

Students may use their own computers or their Stanford Leland accounts. Students will need to submit assignments using the Leland Unix systems. Materials for class assignments will be made available via AFS, and so access to files there will also be required. We will run and evaluate systems on the Leland Unix machines, so they must run correctly on those machines.

Work and Grading

The course will have 6 assignments:

The final assignment may be a group project, but the amount of work should be appropriately scaled to the size of the group, and you should include a brief statement on the responsibilities of different members of the team. Team members will normally get the same grade, but we reserve the right to differentiate in egregious cases. You are also asked to submit an electronic copy of the final project write-up, so that we can make a class projects page. The course may be taken Pass/No Credit if desired.

 

All homework will be due at 5pm, prevailing Pacific time on the dates assigned. You are encouraged to submit your written homework during class, but don't skip class just because you haven't finished it. If not handed in in class, you should give your homework to the course admin, the instructor, or the TA. Written homeworks and programming project write-ups need to be submitted on paper. We cannot accept written assignments by fax or email. Programs will be submitted electronically on the Leland systems. Solutions sets and graded problem sets will be handed out as soon as possible. Extra credit may be given to projects that go substantially above and beyond the requirements in finding creative solutions to the tasks, or which perform exceptionally well. Up to 5% extra credit may also be assigned for class or section participation. To accommodate possible emergencies, you are given 7 late days (calendar days) to use at your discretion in 24 hour increments. So that we can post written homework solutions reasonably promptly, you are limited to a maximum of 3 late days on any one written homework. Homework will not be accepted after solutions have been posted.  You are expected to keep late days for real emergencies. If you exceed the allowed number, points will be deducted at the rate of 10% per day or part thereof. All homework must be legible to be graded.

Policy on Regrades

We do make every effort to ensure that your assignment is graded right the first time! However, sometimes people miss things, or there can be disagreements in interpretation. If you're unhappy with the grade for a question, you need to make a written request for a regrade and to resubmit your entire homework, either to one of the TAs or to the instructor. The request doesn't have to be formal and long. Simply writing on a sheet of paper "8 points were taken off question 3, but I think it's a perfectly valid answer to the question" is sufficient. Normally, the TA will regrade it. If you're still not happy, you should repeat this process, but indicate that you want the instructor to re-regrade it. Negating this policy: you should not e-mail grading complaints, and you can't expect assignments to be regraded "while you wait".

Honor Code

All actual, detailed work on the solution of problem sets must be individual work. You are encouraged to discuss problem sets with each other in a general way, but if you do so, then you must acknowledge the people who you discussed the problem set with at the start of your solutions. You should not look for problem answers elsewhere, but again, if material is taken from elsewhere, then you should acknowledge it. For programming projects, you are not permitted to get programming help from other people. Normally, you are permitted to use pre-existing code, but you must acknowledge code that you have taken from other sources. You will only be evaluated on code that you have written for the project, so it is not in your interests to find code that implements the core algorithms for the project. In general, we will act and expect you to act according to the Stanford Honor Code.

 

Home Page Last modified: Sun Apr 7 16:56:48 PDT 2002