ECE 467: Natural Language Processing

• Instructor Info
• Textbook
• Grading
• Schedule

Instructor Info

Instructor: Carl Sable
Email: carl.sable@cooper.edu
Office: Room 910

Textbook

"Speech and Language Processing, 3rd Edition" (draft, in-progress, on-line only)
by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin

We will also rely on content from various published papers, as cited throughout the course.

Grading

Assignments will be posted here when they are assigned.

• Text categorization project: 25%
  Click here for the corpora for the text categorization project
  Due the night of Sunday, October 11, before midnight
• LSTM project: 25%
• Final project (open-ended deep learning project): 25%
• Three quizzes: 25% (total)

Schedule

Note 1: All dates and topics which have not yet occurred are tentative.

Note 2: All below references to chapters and sections of the Jurafsky and Martin textbook are based on a draft version of the 3rd edition dated January 6, 2026, unless otherwise noted.

• Tuesday, September 1
  Topic 1: Course Introduction (Slides)
  See the syllabus as a single document
• Thursday, September 3
  Topic 2: Words, Morphology, Subwords, and Tokenization (Slides)
  Suggested reading: Chapter 2 of Jurafsky and Martin
• Tuesday, September 8
  Topic 2 (continued)
  Topic 3: Vector Space Models, Information Retrieval, and Text Categorization (Slides)
  Suggested reading: Sections 5.2 - 5.4, Sections 11.1 - 11.2, Sections B.1 - B.8 of Jurafsky and Martin (apppendixes are provided as separate files on the textbook's website)
• Thursday, September 10
  Topic 3 (continued)
• Tuesday, September 15
  Topic 3 (continued)
• Thursday, September 17
  Project #1 assigned
  Topic 4: Linguistic Concepts: Parts of Speech, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, Discourse, Coreference (Slides)
  Suggested reading: Section 17.1, Sections 18.1 - 18.6, Section 19.1, Section 23.1, Section 23.9, Section 24.1, Appendix F, Sections H.1 - H.4 of Jurafsky and Martin
• Tuesday, September 22
  Topic 4 (continued)
• Thursday, September 24
  Topic 4 (continued)
• Tuesday, September 29
  Quiz #1

• Thursday, October 1
  Topic 5: Feedforward Neural Networks
  Suggested reading: Sections 6.1 - 6.3, Section 6.6 of Jurafsky and Martin
• Tuesday, October 6
  Topic 6: Word Embeddings; Neural Language Models; Word2vec
  Suggested reading: Sections 5.5 - 5.7, Section 6.5 of Jurafsky and Martin, original word2vec paper, negative sampling paper
• Thursday, October 8
  Topic 6 (continued)
• Tuesday, October 13
  Topic 7: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs); Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs)
  Suggested reading: Sections 13.1 - 13.6 of Jurafsky and Martin, popular LSTM blog
• Thursday, October 15
  Topic 7 (continued)
• Tuesday, October 20
  Topic 8: Sequence-to-Sequence Tasks and Encoder-Decoder Models; Machine Translation; Cross-Attention
  Suggested reading: Sections 13.7 - 13.8, Sections 12.1 - 12.4, Section 12.6 of Jurafsky and Martin
• Thursday, October 22
  Topic 8 (continued)
• Tuesday, October 27
  Introduction to Jupyter Notebooks, Google Colab, and PyTorch
  Project #2 assigned
• Thursday, October 29
  Topic 9: Question Answering, Reading Comprehension, and SQuAD; Contextual Embeddings and ELMo
  Suggested reading: Sections 14.3 - 14.4 of Jurafsky and Martin (February 3, 2024 draft), ELMo paper
• Tuesday, November 3
  Quiz #2

• Thursday, November 5
  Topic 10: Transformers
  Suggested Reading: Chapter 8 of Jurafsky and Martin, original transformer paper
• Tuesday, November 10
  Topic 11: BERT and BERT Variations; Pretraining, Fine-tuning and Transfer Learning; the GLUE Benchmark
  Suggested Reading: Chapter 9 of Jurafsky and Martin, original BERT paper
• Thursday, November 12
  Topic 11 (continued)
  Topic 12: Large Language Models (LLMs); GPT (several variations); Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF); Prompt Engineering; DeepSeek; Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
  Suggested Reading: Sections 7.1 - 7.6, Section 10.4, Section 11.4 of Jurafsky and Martin, GPT-1 paper, GPT-3 paper, InstructGPT paper
• Tuesday, November 17
  Topic 12 (continued)
• Thursday, November 20
  Topic 13: Ethics of NLP; Relevant Philosophical Issues
  Suggested Readings: Section 4.12, Section 5.8, Section 7.7, Section 12.7 of Jurafsky and Martin, Stochastic Parrots paper
• Tuesday, November 24 (Thursday schedule)
  Project #3 assigned
  Quiz #3

• Tuesday, December 1
  Class time to work on final projects
• Thursday, December 3
  Class time to work on final projects
• Tuesday, December 8
  Class time to work on final projects
• Tueesday, December 15
  Final Project Presentations
• Thursday, December 17
  Final Project Presentations