Week 2: Materials and checklist
A big congratulations to all of you for making it through the first week! Many of you have completed the quizzes for the Week 1 units. If you haven't, please try to catch up as soon as you can. If you are having any technical difficulties, please do let us know.
Week 2 Materials
Lecture Materials
Week 2 lectures are cancelled due to strike. For this reason, the materials below will not be examinable. They are provided for your own self-study. We encourage you to complete them, since they will improve your understanding of later course material (though they are not strictly necessary to understand later material).
- Readings
- JM3 2.0-2.4.2,
- JM2 2.2.0-2.4
- JM2 3.2-3.7 (you can skip 3.4.1)
- JM3 2.5
- Self-assessment exercise
- Solutions will be released at the bottom of this page in the beginning of week 3
- A week 2 quiz has been released in gradescope. It covers different questions from the self-assessment exercise above.
Week 2 Additional Materials
- Compulsory: Week 2 lab
- Solutions will be released Thursday at the bottom of this page
- Optional: Assignment 1 partnering form (see instructions below)
Response to intake form and students' worries
Thank you to everyone who completed our intake form. We now know that we have (at least) 22 different native languages represented in this class, with (at least) another 15 non-native languages! This means that each tutorial discussion group will have students from several different language backgrounds, which should give you a rich source of different experiences that inform your discussions (and other interactions with each other). A slight majority of students have an academic background in computer science, but there are significant numbers of students from linguistics, maths/physics, and engineering backgrounds. So take this opportunity to also engage with your peers who are knowledgeable in different disciplines.
We have also looked over the concerns people expressed in the intake form. While we can't address every concern that was raised, there were two that came up frequently:
- Skills with English and/or writing: Unfortunately, given the size of this course and the many other learning objectives, we can't offer much individual help with these issues, though we will try to provide some general writing guidance in assignment handouts. If you are worried about these issues, please look over the University pages on support for English and the Institute for Academic Development, which offers resources on academic writing as well as many other topics.
- Background knowledge/skills: Various students were worried about the aspects of the course that they're less familiar with (linguistics, programming, maths). Please remember that only a handful of students in the course have all of this background, and we certainly don't expect any previous experience with NLP, so almost all of you will need to stretch your thinking in some way. Your classmates are a great resource, which is one reason why we try to give you opportunities to meet other students, and why we pair you up for the labs and assignments. We can't guarantee that you will get someone from a different background to yourself, but we do try where possible. We also encourage you to find other students to study with, and to ask them or post to Piazza when you're confused. We've already seen some good examples of students helping other students there!
Checklist for students who aren't yet registered, only recently registered, or missed a lot of Week 1
- Make sure you go through all of the steps in the Week 1 checklist.
- Especially important to do as soon as possible: Work through the syllabus and the first lecture, so you know how the course is structured. Also check that you can access the quizzes.
If you run into problems with either of the above, please post to Piazza. In the meantime, keep working through other material to catch up.
Week 2 checklist for all students
Do before you start the lab
- Go through the Preliminaries section of the lab while logged into a DICE machine (i.e. in one of the Appleton Tower labs).
If you are not registered for the course by Monday morning, you won't be assigned to a lab session yet. In that case, please just pick one of the lab times to attend for this week. You'll get a permanent timeslot once you register.
Aim to do on Monday
- Look over the solutions to the Week 1 self-assessment exercises, which will be posted at the end of Week 1 materials on Monday. If you still have any questions after that, post them to piazza.
- Get started working through this week's reading and self-assessment exercise.
Do by Wed/Thu
- Make sure you've gotten a good start on the content units
Do by Monday of next week (Week 3)
- Make sure you've completed all of the Week 1 and Week 2 checklists, including the reading, quizzes, and self-assessments. You will be expected to know the material from the probability tutorial and week 1 going into week 3, and you will find it difficult to catch up if you have fallen behind.
- Complete the Assignment 1 partnering form if you want to work with a partner for the first assignment, which we strongly advise.
- If you found your own partner, one of you should fill in the form to tell us who the partner is.
- If you want us to assign you a partner, fill in the form to tell us that.
- We assume most students will want to work together in person, but if not you can tell us on the form.
- If you want to work alone, you don't need to fill in the form. However, previous experience suggests that pairs tend to do better on the assignment than individuals.