University Homepage School Homepage School Contacts School Search

Foundations of Natural Language Processing Home Page
Winter 2020
Not yet fully updated for 2020

Time and Place

Lectures for this course in 2019, Semester 2, are:

Tuesdays:

10:00 – 10:50am

Lecture Theatre C, DHT

Fridays:

10:00 – 10:50am

Lecture Theatre C, DHT

Note that the only course content on LEARN are the video recordings of lectures. All other content is accessible from these pages. The video recordings are accessible via the link below.

Details

• Course Descriptor
• Week by Week breakdown of lectures, lecture recordings, readings, exercises for lab sessions and the assignments
• Revision: you are expected to already be familiar with the material in these maths tutorials but they are available for revision if you need it.
• Books
  • The set textbook for this course is: Jurafsky, D and J. H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing. The Second Edition (2009) is published as a paperback: There are copies available in the Main Library, shelf mark P98 Jur., for both standard and short loan.
    Many (but not all) chapters from the Third Edition are available in draft form online.
  • In addition, the lab sessions use a lot of the NLTK material and software packages, all of which are explained in the following recommended textbook:
    Bird, S., E. Klein and E. Loper, Natural Language Processing with Python, (2009) O'Reilly Media.
    An online version of this book is at www.nltk.org/book_1ed.
    There is also a draft version of the book for Python 3 at http://www.nltk.org/book/.
    The authors welcome feedback via the GitHub issue tracker
  • The following Leganto link gives details on the books above plus whether they are currently available in the Main Library.
• Lab Sessions:
  • You need to self enroll for one of the following lab sessions:
    • Mondays, 3:10 – 4:00pm, 6.06 Appleton Tower
    • Thursdays, 3:10 – 4:00pm, 6.06 Appleton Tower
    You self enroll via FNLP's LEARN website.
    You can find out here the content of each lab session. They take place in weeks: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9.
• Assessment:
  Assessment will be by:
  • An end of year exam (70%)
    • Date/Time: Monday 11th May 2020, 1300 –1600
  • Coursework (30%): 2 assignments (the first is for feedback only, the second is assessed).
    The (feedback only) assignment 1 and (assessed) assignment 2 are both issued here.
    The deadline for assignment 1 is 4pm Thursday 13th February 2020, but don't attempt it until after week 2. and
    The deadline for (assessed) assignment 2 is 4pm Thursday 12th March 2020 but don't attempt it until after week 4.
    We will endeavour to return feedback to students no later than 3 weeks after the deadlines. For more information, see Informatics coursework guidelines.
  • Feedback
  • Past Exam Papers: can be reached from the main past examination papers page.
  • There is one additional past paper, May 2009, available for study purposes.
  • Note: The rubric for this year's exam is changed slightly from previous years. It now reads as follows:

    Part A is COMPULSORY.
    The short answer questions in Part A are each worth 3 marks, 24 marks in total. Each of the three questions in part B is worth 13 marks --- answer any TWO of these.

• Policy on Late Assignments 
• Good scholarly practice and plagiarism
• Discussion Forum

  We will be using Piazza for course-related discussion. Please register here:piazza.com/ed.ac.uk/winter2020/fnlp. You should direct course-related questions to this forum so that other students can read, respond and benefit from the answers. The lecturers and TAs cannot guarantee that they will monitor or respond in a timely fashion, however. If necessary, email them.

• People
  • Lecturers: Alex Lascarides and Shay Cohen
  • TAs: Rimvydas Rubavicius and Ronald Ahmed Cardenas Acosta
  • Lab Demonstrators: Zheng Zhao and Ben Clavie
  • Markers: Zheng Zhao, Ben Clavie, Jiangming Liu.
  • Year Reps: ug3-reps@inf.ed.ac.uk.
• Feedback: Please take some time to fill in the feedback questionnaires.