Natural Language Processing and Social Interaction, Fall 2015 (original) (raw)

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Prerequisites, course selection, enrollment

Prerequisites All of the following: CS 2110 or equivalent programming experience; a course in artificial intelligence or any relevant subfield (e.g., NLP, information retrieval, machine learning); proficiency with using machine learning tools (e.g., fluency at training an SVM, knowledge of how to assess a classifier’s performance using cross-validation)

Enrollment CS/IS PhD students may enroll online. Other students interested in adding the course, (wel)come to the first day of class. Enrollment questions will be addressed then, when we have a better sense of what the demand is and how many CS/IS PhD students are interested in taking the class.

Choosing among NLP courses: How do I know which one is right for me?

In 2015-2016, we are blessed with a plethora of NLP-related offerings!

At the graduate level:

For undergraduate courses on offer, consult the Cornell NLP course list.

For more information before classes begin The webpage of the previous running (Fall 2014) of this course gives a general idea of what the course will be like

Administrative info and overall course structure

Course homepage http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6742/2015fa. Main site for course info, assignments, readings, lecture references, etc.; updated frequently.

CMS page http://cms.csuglab.cornell.edu. Site for submitting assignments, unless otherwise noted.

Piazza page http://piazza.com/cornell/Fall2015/cs6742 Course announcements and Q&A/discussion site. Social interaction and all that, you know.

Contacting the instructors

Overview of course schedule. Details subject to change. Full schedule is maintained on the main course webpage.

Lecture Agenda Pedagogical purpose Assignments
#1 Course overview A1 released: pilot empirical study for a research idea based on the given readings.
#2 - #4 Lecture topics related to the A1 readings: Online reviews: individual expression, community dynamics; Online asynchronous conversations. Case studies to explore some topics and research styles find interesting. Get-to-know-you exercises to get everyone familiar and comfortable with each other.
Next 6 meetings, not counting presentations or discussions Lectures on, potentially, linguistic coordination, linguistic adaptation, influence, persuasion, diffusion, discourse structure, advanced language modeling Foundational material Potentially some assignments based on the lectures.
Next large block of meetings Dicussion of proposed projects based on the readings Practice with fast research-idea generation. Feedback as to what proposals are most interesting, most feasible, etc. Discussion of student project proposals, based on the readings for that class meeting. Each class meeting thus involves everyone reading at least one of the two assigned papers and posting a new research proposal based on the reading to Piazza. Thoughtfulness and creativity are most important to , but take feasibility into account.
Remainder of the course Activities related to course projects Development of a "full-blown" research project (although time restrictions may limit ambitions). For our purposes, "interesting" is more important than "thorough".
Some time in December (to be determined by the registrar): final project writeup due

Grading Of most interest to is productive research-oriented discussion participation (in class and on Piazza), interesting research proposals and pilot studies, and a good-faith final research project.

Academic Integrity Academic and scientific integrity compels one to properly attribute to others any work, ideas, or phrasing that one did not create oneself. To do otherwise is fraud.

We emphasize certain points here. In this class, talking to and helping others is strongly encouraged. You may also, with attribution, use the code from other sources. The easiest rule of thumb is, acknowledge the work and contributions and ideas and words and wordings of others. Do not copy or slightly reword portions of papers, Wikipedia articles, textbooks, other students' work, Stack Overflow answers, something you heard from a talk or a conversation or saw on the Internet, or anything else, really, without acknowledging your sources. See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6742/2011sp/handouts/ack-others.pdf and http://www.theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/AcadInteg/ for more information and useful examples.

This is not to say that you can receive course credit for work that is not your own — e.g., taking someone else's report and putting your name at the top, next to the other person(s)' names. However, violations of academic integrity (e.g., fraud) undergo the academic-integrity hearing process on top of any grade penalties imposed, whereas not following the rules of the assignment only risk grade penalties.

Resources

#1 Aug 25: Course overview: scope, course goals, course design

Class images, links and handouts

Datasets

References

#2 Aug 27: Reviewing: a social experience?

Class images, links and handouts


Image source: Dorothy Gambrel, Cat and Girl. Permission policy here.

Lecture references

#3 Sep 1: Review helpfulness

Class images, links and handouts

References on lecture topics

#4 Sep 3: From monologues to conversations

Class images, links and handouts

Gespraechsgemetzel
Image: photo of a page from Ben Schott, Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition (2013)

Datasets

References

#5 Sep 8: Discourse "rules" and discourse structure

Class images, links and handouts

References

#6 Sep 10: Intentions and the Grosz/Sidner discourse-structure theory

Class images, links and handouts

References

#7 Sep 15: A1 presentations, part one

#8 Sep 17: A1 presentations**, part two**

#9 Sep 22: Grosz/Sidner annotation exercise discussion

References

#10 Sep 24: Case study: Linguistic coordination

Class images, links and handouts

References

#11 Sep 29: Garley12Beefmoves-Mitra14Kickstarter

Class images, links and handouts

The readings

References

#12 Oct 1: Memes and relations

Class images, links and handouts

The readings

References

#13 Oct 6: Nguyen10Bias-Vasilescu14R

Class images, links and handouts

The readings

References

#14 Oct 8: Lecture title

The readings

References

Oct 13: Fall Break

#15 Oct 15: (Optional) Proposal consultation appointments

If you did not make an appointment for today, you do not need to come to class.

#16 Oct 20: (Mandatory) Feasibility presentations to the instructors

You should only come to class for your appointment slot, not for the whole class-meeting time.

#17 Oct 22:(Mandatory) Feasibility presentations to the instructors

You should only come to class for your appointment slot, not for the whole class-meeting time.

#18 Oct 27: Bayesian identification of features distinguishing two sub-languages

Class images, links and handouts

Image source: http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/p/keep-calm-and-never-tell-me-the-odds-6/.

References

#19 Oct 29: N-Gram Language Models

Class images, links and handouts

Lecture references

#20 Nov 3: Entropy and Divergence

Class images, links and handouts

Lecture references

#21 Nov 5:Advanced yet “off-the-shelf” features roundupp

Assignments/announcements

Class images, links and handouts

References

#22 Nov 10: Probabilistic models for discourse (and hence dialog) structure patterns: a grammar-based perspective

Class images, links and handouts

References

#23 Nov 12: Controlling for confounding factors in observational studies

Assignments/announcements

Class images, links and handouts

Lecture references

#24 Nov 17: (Mandatory) Checkup appointments with the instructors

#25 Nov 19:(Mandatory) Checkup appointments with the instructors

#26 Nov 24: Alternate hypotheses. Language change.

Class images, links and handouts

Lecture references

Nov 26: Thanksgiving Break

#27 Dec 1: project presentations (mandatory attendance by all students for the whole session)

#28 Dec 3: project presentations (mandatory attendance by all students for the whole session)

Final project description due: December 9, 4:30pm on CMS. (date determined by the registrar)

The main evaluation criteria will be the reasonableness (in approach and amount of effort), thoughtfulness, and creativity of what you tried, as documented in your writeup. Individual effort within team projects will be taken into account; see item 3 below.

  1. Use the ICWSM style files provided by AAAI(LaTex style and bib files, Word template)
    1. We make this requirement to facilitate submission to ICWSM 2016. However, note that your final-project submission should have your names and acknowledgments included, in a particular format (see item 1c amd 2b below); in contrast, you will want to strip any identifying information for ICWSM submissions.
    2. AAAI prefers non-numbered section headings. You may change the style files to include section numbers in your headings for the purposes of CS6742 submission.
    3. For the author heading, list only the names of your teammates that are enrolled in the class, even if you had external collaborators. (Reason: only students in the class are submitting the paper for a grade.) But see item 2b1 below.
  2. Include the following sections:
    1. "content" sections: abstract, introduction/motivation, data description (how you gathered, cleaned, and processed it), methods, an experiments, related work, references, conclusions (what you learned), directions for future work.
      • Make sure that your introduction section explicitly sets out your hypothesis or hypotheses.
      • Throughout, highlight your most interesting findings (positive or negative).
      • For the purposes of CS6742 submission, your related-work section does not need to be exhaustive; you may cover just a few most-related papers.
    2. An "acknowledgments" section: give the name and state the contribution of those who you received significant help from. (This may or may not include your advisor(s), one or both of your instructors, fellow students in the class).
      1. Authorship statement: if you intend to ask or have already arranged to have people other than your CS6742-enrolled teammates, also name each such person.
  3. Projects done collaboratively must also include a section describing who did what. External collaborators should be included in this enumeration.
  4. Use the number of pages you feel is appropriate.

Code for generating the calendar formatting adapted from the original versions created byAndrew Myers.