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ANLP: Course activities, Feedback, Assessment, Exam information

Your final mark in this course is based on the following assessed work:

1. Three assignments, worth 10% each (i.e., 30% in total).
2. A final exam (120 minutes), worth 70%.

In addition, this course has unassessed work (labs and tutorials) to help with your learning and to provide feedback.

Details are provided below.

Unassessed work

Labs: This course includes a biweekly 1.5-hour lab session to give you practical experience working with linguistic data and computational methods. Labs should be done in pairs, and with plenty of discussion: see the preamble to Lab 1 for more details. We will try to post each lab in advance where possible, to give students time to look over it, but we assume that most or all of the lab work will take place during lab sessions.

Tutorials: We also hold biweekly tutorials to give you practice with pencil-and-paper exercises and time to ask questions and discuss problem-solving strategies in a small group setting. You are expected to work through the problems as much as you are able to before the tutorial session in order to use the session productively. The tutors can then help with any difficulties you ran across.

See the Time and Place page for lab and tutorial times and locations.
See the Lecture schedule for links to each week's materials.

Assignments

For information about assignments (including due dates), see the assignments page.

Feedback

You can expect to receive feedback on your progress in the course in at least the following ways:

• Lab sessions: During lab sessions your partner is there to help you increase your understanding and improve your work. The lab demonstrators can also give you advice; they will not necessarily be able to comment in detail on all your work, but will be able to give some hints and tips. After the lab sessions, solutions will be posted, often including model code, and you can use these to check your understanding and even learn more. All of these are considered formative assessment , i.e., feedback that is there to help you improve, but does not contribute to your final mark.
• Tutorial sessions: During tutorial sessions your tutor can answer any questions you had in working through the problem sets, and can comment on whether your solutions are correct or whether they could be improved. After tutorial sessions, solutions will be posted, and you can use these to further check your understanding. This feedback from tutors and solutions is formative assessment to help you improve, but does not contribute to your final mark.
• Assignments: Assignments will be marked and returned to you within 10 working days. In order to achieve this, we may not be able to provide detailed individual feedback in all cases, but we will try to do so where possible. In addition, we will provide some general feedback on common problems, and may provide model solutions for some parts of the assignments. Thus, the feedback on assignments is a summative assessment that contributes to your mark and tells you how well you did on the assignment, but also includes aspects of formative assessment which can help you improve on later assignments or later courses.

Exam information

Date and format

Exam dates are fixed by the central University, usually announced around the end of October. For information on the range of possible dates, and the final date and location (when published), see the University examination timetables.

The exam will be a 120 min closed-book exam, with no calculators allowed. The rubric will be announced.

Past papers

Past exam papers can be useful as a general indication of the sorts of questions we may ask, but note that the topics covered in the course, and the format of questions, can vary from year to year.

For a link to all past papers, see here.

Note: Through 2014-15, this course was called Advanced Natural Language Processing. The course underwent significant changes in 2014-15, so the past papers from Advanced/Accelerated NLP 2014-15 and since then are a better guide for what to expect than papers from earlier years. There may also be a change to the exam rubric in 2017-18; we will announce this well before the exam.

Revision guide

For general advice on exam revision and exam strategy, see the Exam Preparation slides.

For a more extensive list of topics/questions to revise, please see the Revision Guide.