Week 1: Introduction, Words and Morphology

What to expect in each week's content page

Welcome to Week 1! From now on, each week you'll see a new content page structured very much like this one. The usual structure will be:

• reminders and announcements (as needed); 
• a brief overview of the week's content;
• a section listing the lecture topics and readings. We will aim to add links to the lecture slides no later than the evening before each lecture, and earlier if possible.
• a section listing additional materials, such as quizzes and exercises you will need to do.

Overview of Week 1

In lectures this week, we will start by introducing ourselves and providing an overview of how this course is structured, and how to get the most out of it. Then we'll move on to discussing words, from both a linguistic and statistical perspective. A common feature of words across many languages is that they are built from smaller pieces, called morphemes. The second half of the week will talk about how this works (morphology), and computational tools related to morphology.

Lectures and reading

Note on mathematics tutorials: Required for those students who are not already familiar with these concepts. Note that the Week 1 Exercises below, and the course material from Week 2 onward assume you're familiar with these concepts, especially Probability Theory. You should get started on these as soon as possible, and work through them by the end of this week.

Additional materials

To successfully learn from this course, you will need to actively work on it. Each week we will provide additional materials such as quizzes and exercises to help you build up your understanding from remembering basic facts to applying methods to synthesizing different ideas and considering strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. Your answers to these problems do not affect your course mark, but it will be very difficult to do well in the course without working through them yourself (or together with other students), before looking at any solutions. 

While it may be tempting to check solutions before working through the problems yourself, that is not a good way to learn the material you need to know for the exam; it is too easy to fool yourself into believing that you would have gotten the right answer. Please work through the exercises and ask questions if you get stuck, or if you are still confused even after seeing the solutions. You can ask your fellow students or on the Piazza discussion forum. 

• ANLP 24-25 intake form (to complete by Thursday eve, should take less than 5 minutes). 
  • Please complete the form even if you’re still deciding whether to take the course. But please don’t complete it if you are just planning to audit (register class-only). 
  • The form will ask a few quick questions about your background. We use this information to get a better sense of the range of students in the class and for course planning and management.
• Quizzes. In this course, short self-assessment quizzes will be released on Gradescope after most lectures. 
  • To access Gradescope, please see the instructions on the Week 0 page. 
  • Quizzes are for you to check your own understanding of basic concepts from the lecture. You will be able to immediately see if your answer is right or wrong, and you can change your answer as many times as you want. Your course mark does not depend on whether you got the right answer or not, but if it looks like you are falling behind on the quizzes, we may check in with you to see if you’re having difficulties. 
• Week 2 Lab.
  • You should work through the Preamble and Preliminaries section only. The rest can be completed during your scheduled lab session in week 2. If you have questions about the Preliminaries section, please post to Piazza.
  • You will need a DICE account to log in to the lab computers for this class. 
    • You will get this automatically: Informatics students get their account when they matriculate. Outside students get their account when they register for this class, so please try to register as soon as possible. 
    • Students work in pairs on the lab, so if you don't have your account in time for the first lab, you can work with a partner who does have an account. But go back and do the Preliminaries section once you get your own DICE account.