Course introduction

Welcome to the course! This unit introduces you to natural language processing as a subfield of computer science, and to written language as a type of data. It presents the course logistics, reviews basic concepts from linguistics and machine learning, and helps you get started with coding in PyTorch. At the end of the unit, you will implement your first neural model.

On-campus sessions

Section	Title	Materials
0.01	Introduction to natural language processing
0.02	Course overview
0.03	Course logistics
0.04	Basic text processing
0.05	Essentials of linguistics
0.06	Statistical bigram model
0.07	Softmax regression
0.08	Introduction to PyTorch
0.09	Neural bigram model

Reading

• Eisenstein (2019), chapter 1 and sections 2.1, 2.5–2.7 and 4.3
• Detailed information about the course logistics is available on this website.