Week 10: Welcome and checklist
Welcome and overview of the week
Welcome to Week 10, the final week of the course! It simultaneously feels like a very long time and just yesterday that we started this course together. I hope you will all take a moment to congratulate yourselves on making it this far, and to reflect on what you have learned so far.
This week is focused on some bigger picture problems that we need to think about when building NLP systems: ethics and bias. We will have two guest lectures: one on the main topic, and another on semantic parsing. Both guest lectures are from researchers currently working in these areas, and will give you a glimpse of the current state of thinking in the field. They will also give you a small taste of NLU+, which most students take after ANLP.
Lecture Materials
- Lecture 1 [pdf] Readings: Hovy and Spruit 2016 (*)
- Lecture 2 [slides]: Guest lecture by Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant and Eddie Ungless on bias in NLP
- Lecture 3: Guest lecture by Laura Perez-Beltrachini on semantic parsing
Additional Materials
- The week 10 tutorial [pdf] will give you practice answering real exam questions, from a previous year's exam. We recommend that you treat this as a practice exam: set a timer for 45 minutes, and write your answers on paper. The questions span material from the whole semester, and will test your knowledge of multiple topics. [solutions]
Exam revision guide
An exam revision guide is now available under the "Assessment" tab in learn. We do not plan to hold any extra revision lectures during Revision Week, because we have already provided a lot of exam preparation throughout the semester (e.g., discussing questions from past papers, the practice test, etc).
Week 10 checklist
- By Wednesday at noon: submit your solutions to assignment 2!
- On Wed/Thu/Fri: attend your tutorial group. You should work through the tutorial sheet first, ideally treating it as exam practice.
- Before the start of next week: Work through all course self-assements and quizzes.
- If you haven't been doing the self-assessments and quizzes, we strongly recommend that you do so. You should attempt to answer each question on your own before looking at the solution, because you need to practice doing the work. If you just read at the question and then read the solution, without first attempting to answer it on your own, you can easily convince yourself that you know the answers. But this is not good practice for the exam, where you need to produce the answers!
- Next Tue (Week 11):
- There will be no more lectures.
- Do something nice to celebrate!
- And then start revising for the exam.