CS662
Advanced Natural Language Processing
Staff
Instructor

Jonathan May
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:00 pm GCS SB10 (LL2) or by appointment
Teaching Assistant

Katy Felkner
Office Hours: 1-3pm Wednesdays, GCS LL2, room SB3, or by appointment on Calendly
Lectures
- Monday and Wednesday 10:00–11:50 am, DMC 261
- See schedule for select days where class is canceled
Textbook
Optional: Natural Language Processing - Eisenstein (‘E’ in schedule) – or free version
Optional: Speech and Language Processing 3rd edition - Jurafsky, Martin (‘JM’ in schedule) – August 2025 pdf
Required: Selected papers from NLP literature, see (evolving) schedule
Grading
Percentage | Assessment Component |
---|---|
10% | In class participation |
10% | Posted questions before each in-class selected paper presentation and possible quizzes |
10% | In-class selected paper presentation |
30% | Three Homeworks (10% each) |
40% | Project, done in small groups, comprising: |
- Proposal (5%) | |
- First version of report (5%) | |
- In-class presentation (10%) | |
- Final report (20%). |
- Written homeworks and project components except for final project report must be submitted on the date listed in the schedule, by 23:59:59 AoE.
- Final project report is due Monday, December 15, 2025, 10:00 AM PST
- A deduction of 1/5 of the total possible score will be assessed for each late day. After four late days (i.e. on the fifth), you get a 0 on the assignment (and you should come talk to us because your grade will likely suffer!)
- You have four extension days, to be applied as you wish, throughout the entire class, for homeworks and project proposal / first report (NOT final report). No deduction will be assessed if an extension day is used. As an example, if an assignment is due November 10, you have two extension days remaining, you submit the assignment on November 12, and your score is 90/100. In this case you lose the extension days but your grade is not reduced; it remains 90/100. If you have one extension day, you lose it, and your grade is 70/100. If you have no extension days, your grade is 50/100.
Contact us
On Slack, or in class/office hours. Please do not email (unless notified otherwise).
Topics
- (subject to change per instructor/class whim) (will not necessarily be presented in this order):
- Fundamentals
- Linguistic Stack (graphemes/phones - words - syntax - semantics - pragmatics - discourse
- Corpora, Corpus statistics, Data cleaning, munging, and annotation
- Evaluation
- Linear and Nonlinear Models
- Dense Representations and neural architectures (feed-forward, RNN, Transformer)
- Language Models
- Pre-training, Fine-tuning, Prompting, Reward Alignment
- Ethics
- Effective written and oral communication
- Corpora, Corpus statistics, Data cleaning, munging, and annotation
- Applications
- Multilingualism and Translation
- Syntax
- Information Retrieval/Question Answering
- Dialogue
- Information Extraction
- Multimodality
- Speech Recognition and Generation
- Agent Interaction
- Discourse
- Syntax
Week 1
- Aug 25
- Introduction, Applications
- E 1, Probabilities (refresher only)
- HW0 out (due 8/29)
- paper selection out (due 9/8)
- project assignment out (due 9/22)
- Aug 27
- Aug 29
- HW0 due
Week 2
- Sep 1
- LABOR DAY NO CLASS
- HW1 out (due 9/19)
- Sep 3
- Linear Classifiers
- E 2.2, 2.3, 2.4. JM 4, app. B, Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques, Goldwater probability tutorial. The Perceptron (Rosenblatt 1958) (optional)
Week 3
- Sep 8
- Sep 10
- Sep 12
- Early Drop (no W, refund)
Week 4
- Sep 15
- Sep 17
- Sep 19
- HW1 due
Week 5
- Sep 22
- Pretrained language models (ELMo, BERT, and sentence similarity)
- JM 10 ELMo paper BERT paper Zoph Fine-Tuning paper Fine-Tuning demo
project proposal due
- Sep 24
- NO CLASS
Week 6
- Sep 29
- Prompting and Large Language Models
- JM 7 T5 LoRA Prefix Tuning T0
- Jinyi Ye - What Happened in LLMs Layers when Trained for Fast vs. Slow Thinking: A Gradient Perspective
- Questions by: Narges Ghasemi Ghaleh Bahmani
- Saba Hashemi Safaei - Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens
- Questions by: Yuxin Yang
- Jinyi Ye - What Happened in LLMs Layers when Trained for Fast vs. Slow Thinking: A Gradient Perspective
- HW2 out (due 10/18)
- Oct 1
- Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
- JM 6, Ziegler RLHF Paper, DPO Paper
- Sadra Sabouri Halestani - HUMT DUMT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs
- Questions by: Nikunj Gupta
- Feiyu Zhu - Self-Instructed Derived Prompt Generation Meets In-Context Learning: Unlocking New Potential of Black-Box LLMs
- Questions by: Sichang (Stephen) He
- Sadra Sabouri Halestani - HUMT DUMT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs
Week 7
- Oct 6
- Efficient Inference
- Narges Ghasemi Ghaleh Bahmani - LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts
- Questions by: Tianming Guo
- Saeed Hedayatian - TreeRL: LLM Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Tree Search
- Questions by: Zhiyuan Gao
- Questions by: Tianming Guo
- Oct 8
- MEGA (Guest Lecture by Xuezhe Ma)
- Mega Paper Megalodon
- Daniel Ruiz - TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignment
- Questions by: Abhinav Vadhera
- Ardysatrio Haroen - Turning Trash into Treasure: Accelerating Inference of Large Language Models with Token Recycling
- Questions by: Chufan Shi
- Daniel Ruiz - TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignment
- Oct 10
- Mid Drop (No W, No refund)
Week 8
- Oct 13
- Agents (Guest Lecture by Tenghao Huang)
- WebArena, ToolLLM, Narrative Discourse, ReAct
- Kiarash Vaziri Goodarzi - TokenFormer: Rethinking Transformer Scaling with Tokenized Model Parameters
- Questions by: Matthew Finlayson
- Kiarash Vaziri Goodarzi - TokenFormer: Rethinking Transformer Scaling with Tokenized Model Parameters
- Oct 15
- Ethics (Guest Lecture by Katy Felkner)
- The Social Impact of Natural Language Processing, Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP, Model Cards for Model Reporting
- Kaicheng Wang - MAIN-RAG: Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Questions by: Ardysatrio Haroen
- Zhiyuan Gao - OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use
- Questions by: Naga Vamsi Ramana Dinavahi
- Kaicheng Wang - MAIN-RAG: Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Oct 17
- HW 2 due
Week 9
- Oct 20
- Information Retrieval (IR) and Question Answering (QA)
- JM 11
- Faith Baca - Large Language Models Are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models
- Questions by: Sajjad Shahabi
- Ruth-Ann Armstrong - Biased LLMs can Influence Political Decision-Making
- Questions by: Saba Hashemi Safaei
- Faith Baca - Large Language Models Are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models
- Oct 22
- Machine Translation (MT)/Multilinguality slides1 slides2
- JM12 Weaver, Translation (1952)
- Tianwen Fu - Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory
- Questions by: Kaicheng Wang
- Nikunj Gupta - Reinforced IR: A Self-Boosting Framework For Domain-Adapted Information Retrieval
- Questions by: Faith Baca
- Tianwen Fu - Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory
Week 10
- Oct 27
- Dialogue
- JM 25, Appendix K
- Shixuan Li - Re-ranking Using Large Language Models for Mitigating Exposure to Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms
- Questions by: Jinyi Ye
- Shixuan Li - Re-ranking Using Large Language Models for Mitigating Exposure to Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms
- HW3 out (due 11/21)
- Oct 29
- Information Extraction
- JM17.3, 20
- Sajjad Shahabi - Integrating Audio, Visual, and Semantic Information for Enhanced Multimodal Speaker Diarization on Multi-party Conversation
- Questions by: Daniel Ruiz
- Tianming Guo - HotelMatch-LLM: Joint Multi-Task Training of Small and Large Language Models for Efficient Multimodal Hotel Retrieval
- Questions by: Shixuan Li
- Sajjad Shahabi - Integrating Audio, Visual, and Semantic Information for Enhanced Multimodal Speaker Diarization on Multi-party Conversation
Week 11
- Nov 3
- Multimodal NLP (Guest Lecture by Xuezhe Ma)
- Anzhe Cheng - SHuBERT: Self-Supervised Sign Language Representation Learning via Multi-Stream Cluster Prediction
- Questions by: Feiyu Zhu
- Gonglin Chen - SpaRE: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Synthetic Data
- Questions by: Wenbin Teng
- Questions by: Feiyu Zhu
- Nov 5
- Spoken Language Processing (SLP) (Guest Lecture by Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri)
- JM 15
- Wenbin Teng - Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning
- Questions by: Kiarash Vaziri Goodarzi
- Chufan Shi - ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation
- Questions by: Tianwen Fu
- Wenbin Teng - Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning
- Nov 7
Week 12
- Nov 10
- Mind Reading (Guest Lecture by Sam Nastase)
- Lydia Ignatova - Dehumanizing Machines: Mitigating Anthropomorphic Behaviors in Text Generation Systems
- Questions by: Gonglin Chen
- Sichang (Stephen) He - Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection
- Questions by: Anzhe Cheng
- Questions by: Gonglin Chen
- Nov 12
- Discourse Slides
- Abhinav Vadhera - JailbreakRadar: Comprehensive Assessment of Jailbreak Attacks Against LLMs
- Questions by: Ruth-Ann Armstrong
- Yuxin Yang - A Troublemaker with Contagious Jailbreak Makes Chaos in Honest Towns
- Questions by: Sadra Sabouri Halestani
- Questions by: Ruth-Ann Armstrong
- Nov 14
- Late Drop (W, No refund)
Week 13
- Nov 17
- TBD
- Danny Deng - LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization
- Questions by: Saeed Hedayatian
- Matthew Finlayson - Geometric Signatures of Compositionality Across a Language Model’s Lifetime
- Questions by: Lydia Ignatova
- Questions by: Saeed Hedayatian
- Nov 19
- Auditing, Dissecting, and Evaluating Large Language Models (Guest Lecture by Robin Jia)
- Naga Vamsi Ramana Dinavahi - Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models
- Questions by: Danny Deng
- Nov 21
- HW 3 due
Week 14
- Nov 24
- Project Presentations
- (10:00) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:18) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:36) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:54) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:12) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:30) TBD
Questions by: TBD
- Nov 26
- THANKSGIVING BREAK; NO CLASS
Week 15
- Dec 1
- Project Presentations
- (10:00) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:18) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:36) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:54) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:12) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:30) TBD
Questions by: TBD
- Dec 3
- NO CLASS