Fall 2023

COSC-3440 | Deep Reinforcement Learning

Grace Hui Yang Undergraduate

Deep reinforcement learning is a machine learning area that learns how to make optimal decisions from interacting with an environment using deep neural networks. An intelligent agent observes the consequences of its action from the environment and alters its behavior to maximize the expected return. We study algorithms and applications in deep reinforcement learning. Topics include Deep neural networks, Markov decision processes, policy gradient methods, Q-Learning (DQN), Actor-Critic, Imitation Learning, and other advanced topics. The course has lectures, readings, programming assignments, and exams.

COSC-4550 (was 488) | Information Retrieval

Nazli Goharian Upperclass Undergraduate & Graduate

Information retrieval is the identification of textual components, be them web pages, blogs, microblogs, documents, medical transcriptions, mobile data, or other big data elements, relevant to the needs of the user. Relevancy is determined either as a global absolute or within a given context or view point. Practical, but yet theoretically grounded, foundational and advanced algorithms needed to identify such relevant components are taught.

The Information-retrieval techniques and theory, covering both effectiveness and run-time performance of information-retrieval systems are covered. The focus is on algorithms and heuristics used to find textual components relevant to the user request and to find them fast. The course covers the architecture and components of the search engines such as parser, index builder, and query processor. In doing this, various retrieval models, relevance ranking, evaluation methodologies, and efficiency considerations will be covered. The students learn the material by building a prototype of such a search engine. These approaches are in daily use by all search and social media companies.

COSC-5455 (was 576) | Introduction to Deep Learning

Joe GarmanGraduate

Recent advances in hardware have made deep learning with neural networks practical for real-world problems. Neural networks are a powerful tool that have shown benefit in a wide range of fields. Deep learning involves creating artificial neural networks with greater layer depth or deep neural nets (DNN) for short. These DNNs can find patterns in complex data, and are useful in a wide variety of situations. In numerous fields, state-of-the-art solutions have been accomplished with DNNs and DNN systems dominate head-to-head competitions. This course will introduce the student to neural networks, explain different neural network architectures, and then demonstrate the use of these neural networks on a wide array of tasks.

COSC-6440 (was 689) | Deep Reinforcement Learning

Grace Hui Yang Graduate

Deep Reinforcement learning is an area of machine learning that learns how to make optimal decisions from interacting with an environment. From the environment, an agent observes the consequence of its action and alters its behavior to maximize the amount of rewards received in the long term. Reinforcement learning has developed strong mathematical foundations and impressive applications in diverse disciplines such as psychology, control theory, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. An example is the winning of AlphaGo, developed using Monte Carlo tree search and deep neural networks, over world-class human Go players. The overall problem of learning from interaction to achieve goals is still far from being solved, but our understanding of it has improved significantly. In this course, we study fundamentals, algorithms, and applications in deep reinforcement learning. Topics include Markov Decision Processes, Multi-armed Bandits, Monte Carlo Methods, Temporal Difference Learning, Function Approximation, Deep Neural Networks, Actor-Critic, Deep Q-Learning, Policy Gradient Methods, and connections to Psychology and to Neuroscience. The course has lectures, mathematical and programming assignments, and exams.

COSC-8530 (was 883) | Search and Mining of Textual Data

Nazli Goharian Graduate: Doctoral [2 credits]

In this doctoral seminar, doctoral students read, present, and discuss research papers on search and mining methodologies to process textual data of any form: short or long, general or domain specific, formal scientific text or some informal social media text. Student groups are assigned projects towards the aim of developing research insights.

LING-4400 (was 362) | Introduction to Natural Language Processing

Amir Zeldes Upperclass Undergraduate & Graduate

This course will introduce students to the basics of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a field which combines insights from linguistics and computer science to produce applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and spell checking. We will cover a range of topics that will help students understand how current NLP technology works and will provide students with a platform for future study and research. We will learn to implement simple representations such as finite-state techniques, n-gram models and basic parsing in the Python programming language. Previous knowledge of Python is not required, but students should be prepared to invest the necessary time and effort to become proficient over the course of the semester. Students who take this course will gain a thorough understanding of the fundamental methods used in natural language understanding, along with an ability to assess the strengths and weaknesses of natural language technologies based on these methods.

LING-4427 (was 367) | Computational Corpus Linguistics

Amir Zeldes Upperclass Undergraduate & Graduate

Digital linguistic corpora, i.e. electronic collections of written, spoken or multimodal language data, have become an increasingly important source of empirical information for theoretical and applied linguistics in recent years. This course is meant as a theoretically founded, practical introduction to corpus work with a broad selection of data, including non-standardized varieties such as language on the Internet, learner corpora and historical corpora. We will discuss issues of corpus design, annotation and evaluation using quantitative methods and both manual and automatic annotation tools for different levels of linguistic analysis, from parts-of-speech, through syntax to discourse annotation. Students in this course participate in building the corpus described here: https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/gum/

LING-4461 (was 461) | Signal Processing

Corey Miller Upperclass Undergraduate & Graduate

How do things like Amazon Echo and Siri work? What kinds of linguistics went into them and how could they be made better? In order to explore these questions, this course will survey speech technology from a computational linguistic perspective. Both speech recognition, also known as speech-to-text (STT), and speech synthesis, also known as text-to-speech (TTS), will be investigated along with related technologies like speaker/dialect/accent/language identification. While communicating the basic algorithms employed by these technologies, the course will emphasize hands-on and project work to allow you to work with web-based and open source tools to build your own components, evaluate existing products and explore linguistic questions. Students from a variety of backgrounds are encouraged to take this course. Helpful background includes: natural language processing, phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics. While not required, helpful technical background includes familiarity with speech analysis software such as PRAAT, Linux, shell scripting and coding/scripting in languages like Python, Java, C++, etc.

ANLY-5800 (was 580) | Advanced NLP

Chris Larson Graduate

This course will cover the major techniques for mining and analyzing textual data to extract interesting patterns, discover knowledge, and support decision-making. In this course, the students will learn the main concepts and algorithms in Natural Language Processing and their applications in data science. These include search and information retrieval, document clustering and classification, topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and deriving meaning from unstructured narratives. In addition to traditional techniques in machine learning such as regression, decision trees, and Naive Bayes algorithms, the course will also examine the latest approaches in Deep Learning. The students will be given the opportunity to develop hands-on experience in building foundational tools and machine learning algorithms that can be applied to real analytics problems. The data obtained from textual content can be used to augment numerical data for the purposes of building predictive models, identifying emerging issues, detecting opinion, and determining important relationships.

Spring 2024

Spring offerings are subject to change. Additional courses TBA.

COSC-285 | Data Mining

Nazli Goharian Upperclass Undergraduate

This course covers concepts and techniques in the field of data mining. This includes both supervised and unsupervised algorithms, such as naive Bayes, neural network, decision tree, rule based classifiers, distance based learners, clustering, and association rule mining. Various issues in the pre-processing of the data are addressed. Text classification, social media mining, and recommender systems will be addressed. The students learn the material by building various data mining models and using various data pre-processing techniques, performing experimentation and provide analysis of the results.

COSC/LING-572 | Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Nathan Schneider Graduate

Systems of communication that come naturally to humans are thoroughly unnatural for computers. For truly robust information technologies, we need to teach computers to unpack our language. Natural language processing (NLP) technologies facilitate semi-intelligent artificial processing of human language text. In particular, techniques for analyzing the grammar and meaning of words and sentences can be used as components within applications such as web search, question answering, and machine translation.

This course introduces fundamental NLP concepts and algorithms, emphasizing the marriage of linguistic corpus resources with statistical and machine learning methods. As such, the course combines elements of linguistics, computer science, and data science. Coursework will consist of lectures, programming assignments (in Python), and a final team project. The course is intended for students who are already comfortable with programming and have some familiarity with probability theory.

COSC-578 | Statistical Machine Learning

Grace Hui Yang Graduate

Statistical machine learning brings together statistics and computational sciences such as computer science, system science, and optimization. The recent developments in bioinformatics, signal processing, information management, finance, and artificial intelligence have been largely influenced by statistical machine learning. With a focus on mathematical and algorithmic theories, this class offers basics in statistical methodology in dealing with applied problems in science and technology. Topics covered in the class include probability, mathematical statistics, inference, sampling, optimization, and their applications in machine learning. The class will have lectures, mathematical homework, exams, and a programming-based project.

COSC-586 | Text Mining & Analysis

Nazli Goharian Graduate

This course covers various aspects and research areas in text mining and analysis. Text may be a document, query, blog, tag description, etc. The structure of the course is a combination of lectures & students' presentations. The lectures will cover Text/Web/query classification, information extraction, word sense disambiguation, opinion mining & sentiment analysis, query log analysis, ontology extraction and integration, and more. The students are assigned a related topic in the field for further study and presentation in the class.

LING-472/ANLY-521 | Computational Linguistics with Advanced Python

Trevor Adriaanse Upperclass Undergraduate & Graduate

This course teaches advanced topics in programming for linguistic data analysis and processing using the Python language. A series of assignments will give students hands-on practice implementing core algorithms for linguistic tasks. By the end of the course, students will be able to transform pseudocode into well-written code for algorithms that make sense of textual data, and to evaluate the algorithms quantitatively and qualitatively. Linguistic tasks will include edit distance, semantic similarity, authorship detection, and named entity recognition. Python topics will include the appropriate use of data structures; mathematical objects in numpy; exception handling; object-oriented programming; and software development practices such as code documentation and version control.

Requirements: Basic Python programming skills are required (for example satisfied by LING-362, Intro to NLP)

LING-504 | Machine Learning for Linguistics

Amir Zeldes Graduate

In the past few years, the advent of abundant computing power and data has catapulted machine learning to the forefront of a number of fields of research, including Linguistics and especially Natural Language Processing. At the same time, general machine learning toolkits and tutorials make handling ‘default cases’ relatively easy, but are much less useful in handling non-standard data, less studied languages, low-resource scenarios and the need for interpretability that is essential for drawing robust inferences from data. This course gives a broad overview of the machine learning techniques most used for text processing and linguistic research. The course is taught in Python, covering both general statistical ML algorithms, such as linear models, SVMs, decision trees and ensembles, and current deep learning models, such as deep neural net classifiers, recurrent networks and contextualized continuous meaning representations. The course assumes good command of Python (ability to implement a program from pseudo-code) but does not require previous experience with machine learning.

Requirements: Intermediate Python (courses such as LING-472: Computational Linguistics with Advanced Python provide a good preparation)

LING-765 | Computational Discourse Models

Amir Zeldes Graduate

Recent years have seen an explosion of computational work on higher level discourse representations, such as entity recognition, mention and coreference resolution and shallow discourse parsing. At the same time, the theoretical status of the underlying categories is not well understood, and despite progress, these tasks remain very much unsolved in practice. This graduate level seminar will concentrate on theoretical and practical models representing how referring expressions, such as mentions of people, things and events, are coded during language processing. We will begin by exploring the literature on human discourse processing in terms of information structure, discourse coherence and theories about anaphora, such as Centering Theory and Alternative Semantics. We will then look at computational linguistics implementations of systems for entity recognition and coreference resolution and explore their relationship with linguistic theory. Over the course of the semester, participants will implement their own coding project exploring some phenomenon within the domain of entity recognition, coreference, discourse modeling or a related area.