Course introduction

Published

January 13, 2025

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 slides
0.02 Course overview
0.03 Course logistics
0.04 Basic text processing  
0.05 Essentials of linguistics
0.08 Introduction to PyTorch  

Part 2

Section Title Materials
0.06 Statistical bigram model notebook, live notebook
0.07 Linear models slides
0.09 Neural bigram model notebook, live notebook

Introduction to PyTorch

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.