CS662
Advanced Natural Language Processing
Staff
![](/USC-CS662/assets/images/jonmay.jpeg)
Jonathan May
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays 9:00–9:50 am, THH 110, or by appointment (at ISI on other days)
Elan Markowitz
Office Hours: Mondays 1:00pm–2:00pm and Wednesdays 12:00pm–1:00pm, located on 4th floor of RTH by whiteboards
Lectures
Monday and Wednesday 10:00–11:50 am, THH 110
Textbook
Required: Natural Language Processing - Eisenstein (‘E’ in schedule) – or free version
Required: Speech and Language Processing 3rd edition - Jurafsky, Martin (‘JM’ in schedule) – January 2022 pdf
Required: Selected papers from NLP literature, see (evolving) schedule
Grading
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, comprising proposal (5%), first version of report (5%), in-class presentation (10%), and final report (20%). Done in small groups.
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 12, 2022, 10:00 AM PST
A deduction of 1/5 of the total possible score will be assessed for each late day. After five late days, you get a 0 on the assignment (and you should come talk to us because your grade will likely suffer!)
You have four late 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 a late day is used.
Contact us
On Piazza, 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):
Linguistic Stack (graphemes/phones - words - syntax - semantics - pragmatics - discourse)
- Tools:
- Corpora, Corpus statistics, Data cleaning and munging
- Annotation and crowdwork
- Evaluation
- Models/approaches: rule-based, automata/grammars, perceptron, logistic regression, neural network models
- Effective written and oral communication
- Components/Tasks/Subtasks:
- Language Models
- Annotation and crowdwork
- Syntax: POS tags, constituency tree, dependency tree, parsing
- Semantics: lexical, formal, inference tasks
- Information Extraction: Named Entities, Relations, Events
- Generation: Machine Translation, Summarization, Dialogue, Creative Generation
- Information Extraction: Named Entities, Relations, Events
Schedule of Classes
- Aug 22
- intro, applications
- E 1
- project assignment out (due 9/19)
- Aug 24
- Aug 29
- linear classifiers
- E 2.2, 2.3, 2.4. JM 4, 5, Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques, Goldwater probability tutorial. The Perceptron (Rosenblatt 1958) (optional)
- HW1 out (due 9/14)
- Aug 31
- nonlinear classifiers, backprop, gradient descent
- E 3. JM 7.2–7.4, 7.6.
- Sep 5
- LABOR DAY NO CLASS
- Sep 7
- distributional feature representations: PPMI, LSA, word2vec, bilingual dictionary induction
- E 14.3, 14.5–6. JM 6.
- (Sep 9): Drop deadline (for refund, without W))
- Sep 12
- ngram language models
- E 6.1–2, 6.4. 7.5, 7.7. JM 3 Exploring the limits of language modeling
- Sep 14
- HW1 due
- Sep 19
- project proposal due
- Sep 21
- Sep 26
- ROSH HASHANAH NO CLASS : :
- HW2 out (due 10/12)
- Sep 28
- POS tags, HMMs, treebanks
- E 7.1–7.4, JM 8.1–8.5, 12 (through 12.4.2)
- Oct 3
- constituencies, cky, dependencies, shift-reduce
- E 10.1–10.4, JM 13.1–13.4, 14–14.4.4
- Oct 5
- YOM KIPPUR NO CLASS :
- Oct 10
- dependencies
- Oct 12
- shift-reduce :
- Smit - Aligning to Social Norms and Values in Interactive Narratives
- Syeda - How Gender Debiasing Affects Internal Model Representations, and Why It Matters
- HW2 due
- Oct 17
- machine translation: history, evaluation, data
- Oct 19
- machine translation: statistical, recurrent, transformer, transfer learning, unsupervised, nonautoregressive
- Oct 24
- MEGA (Guest Lecture by Xuezehe Ma)
- HW3 out (due 11/16)
- Oct 26
- semantics: logical/compositional, frames and roles, amr, distributional
- E 12.1, 12.2, 13.1, 13.3, 14.1-3, 14.6-8, JM 15.1-3, 6
- Charles - Theory-Grounded Measurement of U.S. Social Stereotypes in English Language Models
- Mina - How Conservative are Language Models? Adapting to the Introduction of Gender-Neutral Pronouns
- Oct 31
- Vision-and-language Models (Guest lecture: Xuezhe Ma)
- Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models, Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations, Variational Diffusion Models, Understanding Diffusion Models: A Unified Perspective
- Basem - Explaining Dialogue Evaluation Metrics using Adversarial Behavioral Analysis
- Leticia - Learning Dialogue Representations from Consecutive Utterances
- Nov 2
- dialogue: task-oriented and chatbots
- E 19.3, JM 24 The original ELIZA
- Zhivar - Semantic Diversity in Dialogue with Natural Language Inference
- Fazle - On the Origin of Hallucinations in Conversational Models: Is it the Datasets or the Models?
- Project Report Version 1 due
- Nov 7
- Nov 9
- natural language inference and common sense tasks
- Modeling Semantic Containment and Exclusion in Natural Language Inference, Commonsense Reasoning and Commonsense Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence
- Sophie - Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation
- Jiarui - JointLK: Joint Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Commonsense Question Answering
- Nov 14
- prompts, multi task large language models
- InstructGPT paper (pp1–20), Large Language Models are Human-Level Prompt Engineers
- Darpan - Robust Conversational Agents against Imperceptible Toxicity Triggers
- Nov 16
- adapters, prefix tuning, few-parameter fine-tuning
- TBD
- Sahana - Learning to Transfer Prompts for Text Generation
- HW3 due
- Nov 21
- information extraction
- JM 17, E 17, 25 years of IE
- Nov 23
- THANKSGIVING BREAK; NO CLASS
- Nov 28
- Project presentations
- Nov 30
- Project presentations