CS 224U (LING 188/288) Natural Language Understanding Winter 2013

Course information

Catalog description Machine understanding of human language. Computational semantics (determination of sense, event structure, thematic role, time, aspect, synonymy/meronymy, causation, compositional semantics, treatment of scopal operators), and computational pragmatics and discourse (coherence relations, anaphora resolution, information packaging, generation). Theoretical issues, online resources, and relevance to applications including question answering, summarization, and textual inference. Prerequisites: one of LING180, CS224N, CS224S; and knowledge of logic (LING130A or B, CS157, or PHIL159).

Requirements

Class participation

Attendance will be taken daily, with one point assigned for each class attended. Class will begin on time and end on time; we are obliged to finish on time, and you are obliged to arrive on time.

We would like everyone to ask questions, offer ideas, etc., in class. Questions and ideas sent via email to also count as participation, though we would prefer it if everyone got involved during our class meetings.

Homeworks

There are 13 short homeworks. The homeworks will depend on materials from the readings, so you should do the readings before starting the homeworks. With the reading done, each homework should take you 15-20 minutes (longer if you decide to pursue the issues in greater depth, perhaps as a lead-in to a project).

Our goals for the homeworks: (i) to raise important questions, (ii) to foster common ground for the in-class discussions, and (iii) to help you master central NLU concepts.

• All homeworks are due by the start of class on the day they are due.
• Submit all homeworks by email to the course address:
• Acceptable formats: txt, rtf, doc, docx, pdf.
• Make the subject of your submission email suid: homework #1 with the appropriate SUID and homework number

Final project

The final project is the main assignment of the second half of the course. Final projects can be done in groups of 1-3 people. They are required to be related in a substantive way to at least one of the central topics of the course. The main components are as follows:

1. Literature review paper (due Feb 14, 11:59pm): a short 6-page single-spaced paper summarizing and synthesizing several papers on the area of your final project. Groups of one should review 5 papers, groups of two should review 7 papers, and groups of three should review 9. The ideal is to have the same topic for your lit review and final project, but it's possible that you'll discover in the lit review that you hate the topic, so you can switch topics (or groups) for the final project; your lit review will be graded on its own terms. Tips on major things to include:
   • General problem/task definition: What are these papers trying to solve? Why?
   • Concise summaries of the articles: Do not simply copy the article text in full. We can read them ourselves. Put in your own words the major contributions of each article.
   • Compare and contrast: Point out the similarities and differences of the papers. Do they agree with each other? Are results seemingly in conflict? If the papers address different subtasks, how are they related? (If they are not related, then you may have made poor choices for a lit review...). This section is probably the most valuable for the final project.
   • Future work: Make several suggestions for how the work can be extended. Are there open questions to answer? This would presumably include how the papers relate to your final project idea.
2. Project milestone (due Feb 28 Mar 5, 11:59pm): a short overview of your project including at least the following information:
   1. A statement of the project's goals.
   2. A summary of previous approaches (drawing on the lit review).
   3. A summary of the current approach.
   4. A summary of progress so far: what you have been done, what you still need to do, and any obstacles or concerns that might prevent your project from coming to fruition.
3. Presentations (March 12 & 14): We'll use the last two sessions of the course for in-class final project presentations.
4. Final paper (due at the end of our scheduled exam period: March 20, 3:15 pm): The paper should be 8 pages long, in ACL submission format. Here are the LaTeX and Word templates for the current ACL style. Please email the paper as a PDF file to . What to put in a final project paper:
   • Research papers: These are papers where you attempted some new research idea. This doesn't have to be publishable research; it's totally great to do a replication of a result you read about. Such papers should contain clear sections describing (i) the problem you are addressing; (ii) your hypothesis or proposed solution (and if you are implementing someone else's solution, where you got the idea from); (iii) alternative solutions, or at least a baseline that you are comparing your solution to; (iv) your methodology; (v) your evaluation; and (vi) some discussion of what your results imply for your hypothesis/problem.
   • Implementation papers: These are papers where you code up a version of someone else's algorithm just to learn the details of the algorithm, or do a big semantic data labeling project. Here your want clear sections describing (i) the task that you are replicating, the algorithm you are implementing, or the data you are labeling; (ii) your methodology (what you did, how you did it); (iii) an evaluation, i.e., the experimental results; and (iv) a discussion of what you learned.

Policies

Grading

Your grade is determined based on:

• Class participation: 10%
• Homeworks: 30%
• Literature review: 15%
• Project milestone: 10%
• Final presentation of project: 5%
• Final project paper: 30%

Policy on late work

Each student will have a total of 4 free late (calendar) days applicable to any assignment (including the lit review and project milestone) except the final project paper. These can be used at any time, no questions asked. Each 24 hours or part thereof that a homework is late uses up one full late day. Once these late days are exhausted, any homework turned in late will be penalized 20% per late day. Late days are not applicable to final projects. If a group's assignment is late n days, then each group member is charged n late days.

Policy on submitting related final projects to multiple classes

On the one hand, we want to encourage you to pursue unified interdisciplinary projects that weave together themes from multiple classes. On the other hand, we need to ensure that final projects for this course are original and involve a substantial new effort.

To try to meet both these demands, we are adopting the following policy on joint submission: if your final project for this course is related to your final project for another course, you are required to submit both projects to us by our final project due date. If we decide that the projects are too similar, your project will receive a failing grade. To avoid this extreme outcome, we strongly encourage you to stay in close communication with us if your project is related to another you are submitting for credit, so that there are no unhappy surprises at the end of the term. Since there is no single objective standard for what counts as "different enough", it is better to play it safe by talking with us.

Fundamentally, we are saying that combining projects is not a shortcut. In a sense, we are in the same position as professional conferences and journals, which also need to watch out for multiple submissions. You might have a look at the current ACL/NAACL policy, which strives to ensure that any two papers submitted to those conferences are make substantially different contributions — our goal here as well.

Academic honesty

Please familiarize yourself with Stanford's honor code

http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/judicialaffairs/policy/honor-code

We will adhere to it and follow through on its penalty guidelines.

Students with documented disabilities

Students who may need an academic accommodation based on the impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Student Disability Resource Center (SDRC) located within the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). SDRC staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, and prepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty dated in the current quarter in which the request is being made. Students should contact the SDRC as soon as possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra Walk (phone: 723-1066).

Schedule