This schedule is tentative and subject to change.
| Week | Date | Topic | HW Assigned | HW Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aug 26 | Intro: NLP Landscape and History, Course Objectives | ||
| Aug 28 | Intro: Representation in NLP | |||
| 2 | Sep 2 | Probability Theory and Language Modeling | ||
| Sep 4 | N-Gram Language Models | |||
| 3 | Sep 9 | Naive Bayes and Document Classification | ||
| Sep 11 | Logistic Regression, Softmax Regression | HW1: Language ID | ||
| 4 | Sep 16 | Word Embeddings and Distributional Semantics | ||
| Sep 18 | Feed-Forward Neural Networks | |||
| 5 | Sep 23 | Modeling Sequences: RNNs and NER, Encoder-Decoder, Beam Search | ||
| Sep 25 | Self-Attention and Transformers | |||
| 6 | Sep 30 | LLMs I: Pretraining, Encoder-only, Finetuning | ||
| Oct 2 | LLMs II: Encoder-Decoder, Decoder-Only, ICL | HW2: Language Modeling | HW1 | |
| 7 | Oct 7 | Review: In-class review for Midterm Exam | ||
| Oct 9 | Midterm Exam | |||
| 8 | Oct 14 | Fall Break - No Class | ||
| Oct 16 | Fall Break - No Class | |||
| 9 | Oct 21 | LLMs III: RLHF, DPO, Guardrails | ||
| Oct 23 | Machine Translation, Multilingual NLP | HW3: Clickbait Detection | HW2 | |
| 10 | Oct 28 | History of QA (including NER, IR, scoring) | ||
| Oct 30 | Modern QA (LLM, prompting, RAG, etc.) | |||
| 11 | Nov 4 | Democracy Day - No Class | ||
| Nov 6 | In-Class Exercise: Question Answering Challenge | |||
| 12 | Nov 11 | Syntax and Parsing | ||
| Nov 13 | Information Extraction and Coreference | HW4: TBD | HW3 | |
| 13 | Nov 18 | Semantics and Reasoning | ||
| Nov 20 | Natural Language Inference | |||
| 14 | Nov 25 | Ethics and NLP | ||
| Nov 27 | Thanksgiving Break - No Class | |||
| 15 | Dec 2 | In-Class Exercise: LLM Toxicity Challenge | ||
| Dec 4 | Final Review: In-class review for Final Exam | HW4 |
