Schedule

Notes:

• Unless otherwise noted, assignment submissions are due by 1pm on the Friday of the week indicated. (They will also be clearly indicated in each homework description.)
• The schedule is subject to change, as the semester progresses, however any changes will be made at least one week in advance of the dates affected.

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Week 1. January 14

• Topics
  • NLP Overview
  • Scala Overview
• Readings (1/16)
  • The Scala REPL, expressions, variables, basic types, simple functions, saving and running programs, comments.
  • Tuples, Lists, methods on Lists and Strings
  • Conditional execution with if-else blocks and matching
  • Iterating, mapping, filtering and counting

Week 2. January 21

NOTE: No class on Monday, January 21 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day)

• Topics

  • Regular expressions
  • Scala: functional programming

• Readings (1/23)

  • Regular expressions and matching with them
  • Regular expression matching and substitution with the Regex API
  • Maps, Sets, groupBy, Options, flatten, flatMap
  • Word counting, scala.io.Source, file access, flatMap, mutable Maps
  • Code blocks, coding style, closures, Scala documentation project.

• Due. Homework1: Scala

Week 3. January 28

• Topics

  • Authorship attribution
  • Spelling correction
  • Vector-space models and computing similarity
  • Scala: object-oriented programming
  • Build systems

• Readings (1/28)

  • Variations for computing results from sequences in Scala
  • Student questions about Scala, Part 1
  • Student questions about Scala, Part 2

• Readings (1/30)

  • Objects, classes, inheritance, traits, Lists with multiple related types, apply
  • Scripting, compiling, main methods, return values of functions
  • SBT, scalabha, packages, build systems
  • Manning et al, Chapter 6, Section 6.3.

• Due. Project Phase One

Week 4. February 4

• Topics
  • Clustering
  • Data formats (CSV, XML, JSON)
• Readings (2/4)
  • Basic XML processing with Scala
  • Manning et al, Chapter 16, Sections 16.1-16.4.
• Readings (2/6)
  • Processing JSON in Scala using Jerkson
  • Manning et al, Chapter 17, Sections 17.1-17.4.
• Due. Homework2: Regular expressions

Week 5. February 11

• Topics
  • Classification
• Readings (2/11)
  • Manning et al, Chapter 13, Sections 13.1,13.2,13.6
• Readings (2/13)
  • Manning et al, Chapter 14, Sections 14.0,14.1,14.3-14.5

Week 6. February 18

• Topics
  • Evaluation
  • Sentiment analysis
• Due (2/18). Project Phase Two

Week 7. February 25

• Topics
  • Topic models
• Due (2/25): Homework3: Clustering

Week 8. March 4

• Topics
  • In class exercise: Topic Modelling
• Due (3/8). Project Phase Three

Spring Break. March 11-16

Week 9. March 18

• Topics

  • Part-of-speech Tagging
  • Label propagation

• Due. Homework4: Classification

Week 10. March 25

• Topics
  • Actor-based programming with Akka
  • PageRank

Week 11. April 1

• Topics
  • Named entity recognition
  • MapReduce, Hadoop and Spark
  • Amazon Web Services
• In class exercise: Launch clusters on Amazon's EC2 service and use Spark to count words in files, and work with HDFS

Week 12. April 8

• Topics
  • Spark
  • Pseudo-grounding of text
• In class exercise: Run standalone jobs using Spark, attach EBS volumes and work with larger files HDFS.
• Due (4/10). Project4

Week 13. April 15

• Topics
  • Text processing pipelines
• In class exercise: Chalk tutorial for sentence detection, tagging and NER

Week 14. April 22

• Topics
  • Randomized data structures and algorithms for NLP and machine learning.
  • Whistle-stop tour of further topics.
  • Guest talk by Elizabeth Winkler of Mass Relevance.
• Due (4/24). Homework 5: Twitter sentiment analysis

Week 15. April 29

• Topics
  • Project demos/presentations
  • Wrap-up
• Due (5/6). Project: step 5

Finals week

• Due (5/13, 1pm). Project code and write-up