COMP6713 Notices

Thank you!

Posted by Aditya Joshi Thursday 09 May 2024, 11:54:55 AM.

Dear all,

The final exam marks have been finalized, and your grades will be available in the myUNSW portal, after due validation and approvals. I am happy with the overall grades of the class!

Thanks again for being a fantastic class. It was a pleasure interacting with all of you during the lectures and consultation sessions. It is also a good time to thank the wonderful course team consisting of Lihua Wang (Lily), Xiangyu Zhang (Tony) and Saurav Jha. Lily and Tony worked hard through the tutorials. All three of them were excellent mentors and assessors.

I am currently open to supervising honors and research projects for undergrad/postgrad students. Some project topics are on TMS - happy to discuss other ideas. Please reach out. Similarly, if you have NLP startup/research ideas, I would love to chat.

Regards,

Aditya

Information about the final exam

Posted by Aditya Joshi Thursday 25 April 2024, 11:52:28 PM.

Hello all,

As promised, here are the details of the final exam.

==

The exam will be held on Moodle on 1st May 2024 from 9:00 am to 11:00 am. The exam is not invigilated. Therefore, you can attend from home. University policies for online exams apply. ( https://www.student.unsw.edu.au/exam/rules )

What to expect:

• The exam will consist of ten questions. You must correctly answer all questions to score full marks.
• You can expect a mix of questions with multiple choice answers, short answers and essay-based answers.
• All answers will be manually marked.
• The questions may be of the following types: (a) Write the pseudocode for.. , (b) Explain this code for…, (c) Design an NLP system for.. . (d) Explain this method… (e) Give examples where… (f) Explain architectural choices …. ,etc.
• The above is not a complete list but should be used as a broad indicator of what to expect.
• A practice exam is now available on Moodle. Please take a look and feel free to ask questions about the practice exam in the forum.
• You will not be required to write code, draw diagrams or upload photos of handwritten material during the exam.

• On the day, please read all instructions on the Moodle page for the final exam before you start answering.
• Answer the questions on your own, to the best of your ability. If you need to make assumptions, state them in your answer.
• Please remember to add justifications where possible. We may be able to award partial marks in case your answer is wrong.
• You may use a handwritten A4 sheet and a UNSW-approved calculator during the exam. You must not use any other external resources.
• Apart from the two mentioned above, the use of AI tools, books, notes or any other external help constitutes cheating.
• Do not post questions on the forum during the exam. Such posts will be deleted.
• Please contact the Special Considerations team, if required. I am not authorized to grant them.
• You may email me during the exam in an emergency situation. However, I may not respond to emails that seek clarifications that will be unfair to the class.
• Cheating will be reported.

There will be no in-person consultation next Monday. However, if you want to discuss the course material before the exam, please email me to schedule a time or post questions on the forum.

==

Good luck! :)

Regards,

Aditya

P.S.: The marks for your group projects will be available before the final exam.

Last day for the survey

Posted by Aditya Joshi Thursday 25 April 2024, 01:53:17 PM.

Hi all,

Today is the last day for the myexperience survey for COMP6713, and we are about 7 completions away from reaching the target of 75% response rate. I encourage you to complete the survey, if you have not done so already.

Regards,

Aditya

Final Exam

Posted by Aditya Joshi Sunday 21 April 2024, 01:35:25 PM.

Hello all,

The final exam will be held on 1st May 2024 from 9:00 am to 11:00 am. The exam will be held on Moodle and will not be invigilated. This means that you can attempt the exam from home.

• Familiarize yoursel with the online exam rules of the University.
• To help you with your preparation, I have created a document that summarizes all the reading material for the course, along with some FAQs: https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/static/uploads/cou...

Additional details to follow.

Regards,

Aditya

P.S.: The current myexperience survey response rate is 51%

Congrats on completing your group project

Posted by Aditya Joshi Thursday 18 April 2024, 07:37:25 PM.

Dear all,

Congrats on completing your group project. I skimmed through a couple of presentations a while ago and they look super-cool.

Meanwhile, I will remind you to complete the myexperience survey for COMP6713. The survey is completely anonymous and does not take long. The survey will be open only until April 25th.

As promised in the class, I will share the question format of the final exam, the day the response rate reaches 75%. The current response rate is only 33%. Your feedback is valuable to us - particularly since this is the first offering of the course. I hope you will support the course team in this regard.

Congrats again for the project. Please remember to find time for some well-deserved rest before you begin preparing for the final exam(s)!

Regards,

Aditya

Individual assignment marks now available

Posted by Aditya Joshi Monday 15 April 2024, 03:37:15 PM, last modified Monday 15 April 2024, 04:02:22 PM.

Dear all,

You should be able to see your individual assignment marks in Moodle.

Auto-marking: Auto-marking was done using test cases. Marks that you see are based on the performance of your code in terms of a metric (precision/accuracy), as appropriate. Some submissions unfortunately ran into errors. We have noted them in the Moodle comments.

Manual marking: You will see individual marks for Parts 1 and 2, along with a feedback.

Please verify that the total (out of 20) looks correct to you - in case there is an error, email me.

The class average is 13 marks, with the highest being 19.5.

If you wish to discuss your marks, you may email aditya.joshi@unsw.edu.au and saurav.jha@unsw.edu.au.

Regards,

Aditya

Submission instructions for the group project

Posted by Aditya Joshi Sunday 14 April 2024, 08:29:32 PM.

Dear all,

As you know, the submission deadline for the group project is 18th April 7:00pm Sydney time.

The submission instructions for the group project are now available in this document: https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/static/uploads/cou...

This document is also available on the Moodle submission page.

Please ensure that you read all the instructions carefully and upload your projects accordingly. Of particular importance is the document outlining individual effort. You will find the complete list of requirements and the marking guide in the document.

If you have any questions regarding the group project submission, please email me.

Good luck!

Regards,

Aditya

Guest speakers in Monday's lecture

Posted by Aditya Joshi Wednesday 10 April 2024, 10:39:38 AM.

Dear all,

In the lecture on Monday (15th April), we will have two guest speakers (in no specific order):

1. Dr. Sonit Singh (Lecturer, School of CSE, UNSW) will talk about multimodal language models, highlighting the intersection of text-based models (which have been the focus of this course) with other modalities such as images, speech, and robotics. The talk will be recorded. Sonit will join us in person.
2. Matthew Purcell (Senior Technical Trainer, AWS) will join me in a fireside chat-style discussion about the skills and opportunities for a career in the NLP space. He will also take questions from the audience present in the room. Matt has requested to not be recorded. Therefore, the session will be muted, and will not be available in the recording. Matt is based in Canberra, and will join us online.

Both of these sessions are NOT included in the syllabus for the final exam. However, I am confident that you will enjoy hearing from both of our speakers.

In the lecture on Tuesday, I will cover module 10: applications and frontiers. Since it will be the last lecture of the course, I hope to see many of you there.. for one last time as a part of this course! :)

Regards,

Aditya

Reminder to complete the myExperience survey

Posted by Aditya Joshi Monday 08 April 2024, 08:41:55 PM.

Dear all,

The myExperience survey is now open and will remain so until 25th April. I request you all to please complete the survey, and provide your feedback. Since this was the first offering of the course, it is particularly important for us to know what worked well. The feedback will also help us determine what needs to change, and if the course should be offered again.

Depending on the response rate, I might remind you again. :)

Regards,

Aditya

Quiz 8 closes tomorrow at 5:25pm

Posted by Aditya Joshi Saturday 06 April 2024, 07:56:44 PM, last modified Saturday 06 April 2024, 07:56:52 PM.

Dear all,

This is a gentle reminder that the quiz for week 8 closes tomorrow at 5:25pm.

Also, the consultation on 8th April (next Monday) will run from 4pm-6pm to make time for group project discussions. Some of you have already scheduled time. Rest, please feel free to join from 4:30pm onwards. If you are joining online, send me an email in advance.

Regards,

Aditya

Announcements

Posted by Aditya Joshi Wednesday 03 April 2024, 12:27:46 PM.

Dear all,

Here are some announcements, some based on the emails that I have been getting:

• Final exam: The final exam will be held online and will be on Moodle. You will be permitted to use one hand-written A4 sheet. You will not be allowed to use any external source, either online or offline. This means that any book, paper, printed or digital notes, online tool are not permitted. Needless to add, you will be required to answer all questions by yourself with no help from any individual or group. I will remind you to look at the University policies for online examinations and ensure that you avoid any wrongdoing during the final exam.
• Next class: In the class next Monday, I plan to run an interesting group activity where you will go through websites of some startups trying to 'reverse-engineer' (or at least, guess) the underlying NLP systems. I encourage you all to attend in person and carry a device (smartphone or laptop) that will allow you to access their websites.
• Quizzes: There will be a Moodle quiz this week and next. There will be no Moodle quiz in Week 10.
• Tutorials: Tutorials will continue to run until week 10. The tutors have been doing a fantastic job getting into details of the models covered in the class. I hope you will take advantage of the experience of the tutors.
• Projects: I hope you all are spending sufficient time and effort on your projects and are in touch with your mentors. You should have finalized the scope by now, and, preferrably, have the baseline (statistical/rule-based) model in place. Unfortunately, some students have reported that their team members are not responding to their emails. Group projects are an important opportunity to learn teamwork along with NLP implementation skills. Working together is an important industry skill.

I hope you have all enjoyed the course so far. With two weeks of teaching ahead of us, I hope the course will continue to be interesting.

-Adi

Monday Tutorial Scheduling for Easter Week

Posted by Lihua Wang Thursday 28 March 2024, 07:51:00 PM.

Hi everyone,

Please note that there will be no tutorial next Monday due to the public holiday. Instead, students enrolled in Monday tutorials are invited to attend the session with Xiangyu on Tuesday, 2-3 PM, in Matthew Building Room 230.

Happy Easter, and enjoy your holidays!

Best,

Lihua

Machine Translation (Part 1) now in Echo360

Posted by Aditya Joshi Wednesday 27 March 2024, 03:31:35 PM.

Hi all,

To make up for the missed lecture next Monday (due to the public holiday), I have recorded the first part of the Machine Translation module. The recording is available on Echo360, the same page where you access regular lecture recordings - as seen in the screenshot below.

Our next in-person lecture will be on Tuesday, 2nd April at 11:00 am.

Wish you all a good Easter break!

Regards,

Aditya

P.S.: The winner(s) of the poll for the coolest group name are announced in this recording.

Assignment 1 clarifications and instructions

Posted by Saurav Jha Tuesday 19 March 2024, 10:33:57 AM.

Dear all,

As we have been receiving a high volume of coding-related queries, I wanted to remind you on the assignment's primary goal of serving you a real-world job ad parsing environment.

That said, we may not be able to help you with all sorts of trivial programming challenges in order to achieve the desired results. Moreover, that is precisely the part where we expect to see your creative coding skills.

Also, here are a couple of points to consider in case you have been feeling stuck with your code:

• If the task is not clear to you from the assignment description, please consider taking a look at the provided code scaffolds (e.g., the arguments to the functions, the return type, etc.). For example, the function parse_k_nearest() is to be called with individual job title given its argument type is a string.
• Please do not edit or modify the functions provided in the scaffolds as these will be used to evaluate your submission. You may add helper functions to test your code per your convenience.
• The job ad format used for testing can possibly be a combination of the first example job ad and the second one.

Finally, allow me to remind you of the submission deadline being 20th March 5pm Sydney time . We may not be accepting further extension requests citing the coding and/or description-related challenges.

Best regards,

Saurav

Group project, etc.

Posted by Aditya Joshi Monday 18 March 2024, 10:26:14 PM.

Hi all,

Hope you are using the flexibility week to consolidate your learning and to complete the individual assignment. Please also make time to rest (as much as possible) so you return re-energised! :)

Next week, your tutors will be working with you on the project scope document that I discussed in the lecture last Tuesday. Therefore, I encourage you to attend the tutorial (and also the subsequent tutorials). You have also been assigned a mentor for your group projects, as shown in the table below:

Mentor emails: Lihua Wang <lihua.wang@unsw.edu.au>; Xiangyu Zhang <xiangyu.zhang2@unsw.edu.au>; Saurav Jha <saurav.jha@unsw.edu.au>;

If you want to discuss the project scope with me, brainstorm ideas, debug code or simply celebrate your project results (when you have them), please schedule a meeting with me until the end of week 10 using this link: https://calendly.com/aditya-m-joshi/comp6713-proje...

Regards,

Aditya

P.S.: Gentle reminder: The individual assignment is due on 20th March 5:00pm Sydney time.

P.S.: Lectures, tutorials, and weekly quizzes will resume from 25th March. None this week.

Sample job ad, solution and explanation for individual assignment

Posted by Saurav Jha Friday 15 March 2024, 10:19:23 AM.

Dear all,

You can now find another sample job ad and the solutions for part 1 and part 2 alongside their explanations at this URL: https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP6713/24T1/reso...

We hope this gives you a better understanding for structuring your solution and your submission.

Best regards,

Saurav

Quiz - Week 5 open now

Posted by Aditya Joshi Tuesday 12 March 2024, 08:43:21 PM.

Reminder that the quiz for this week is now open and will be available till Sunday 5:25pm.

Regards,

Aditya

Scoping your group projects

Posted by Aditya Joshi Tuesday 12 March 2024, 02:03:46 PM.

Hello all,

As discussed in the class earlier today, the guideline document for the group project is now available on webcms: https://webcms3.cse.unsw.edu.au/COMP6713/24T1/reso... You will find it under Course Work > Tutorials > Group Project. Please sure you read the document carefully. If you have any questions, please reach out to your mentor or to any of us in the course team.

Final Project Submission Deadline: 18th April, 2024, 7:00pm Sydney time

The deliverables of the project will need to be uploaded on Moodle. Please reach out to your mentor or any of us in the team if you have questions.

1) Some of you have NOT completed the project registration form. I have sent you an email reminder. Can I please request you to complete it by the deadline indicated in the email?

2) The poll to vote for the coolest team name is available on Moodle and will be open for two weeks! Voting in the poll is optional, and does not form a part of assessment for the course.

Regards,

Aditya

Minor Update to the Individual Assignment

Posted by Aditya Joshi Saturday 09 March 2024, 03:14:03 PM.

Dear all,

There is a minor update to part 2 of the assignment. I apologise for the change, but I hope you will see that the change is indeed minor.

Here's the gist of the update:

- Instead of retrieving top-3 job descriptions from the input job ad, you will need to retrieve top-3 skill descriptions from the skill ontology.

- The scaffolding code is unchanged. The assignment description has been updated.

- The change makes the assignment easier because you no longer have to parse sentences in the job ad to retrieve candidate sentences.

- As mentioned above, the assignment description document on Moodle has been updated. The edited parts have been highlighted so you know exactly what has been changed.

To accommodate this change, the assignment deadline has been extended to 20th March 5pm Sydney time.

Regards,

Aditya

P.S.: Thanks, Shaun Kelly, for bringing the contradiction to our attention. If you ever attend the in-person consultation, I owe you a thank-you coffee.

Register your project teams by 8th March

Posted by Aditya Joshi Friday 01 March 2024, 03:48:04 PM.

Dear all,

The group project is an important component of the assessment for COMP6713. It is an opportunity for you to apply the skills learned during the course. The project will hopefully end up as a bullet point on your CV! Therefore, we invite you to pick your project topics and register your teams. Please use this form to do so: https://forms.office.com/r/NpfFmRdQSZ

While you will have weekly mentoring from the COMP6713 team, we encourage you to drive the projects.

Please read the instructions at the top of the form carefully since they include the expectations and deadlines concerning the project.

Please reach out to your tutors during the tutorial, or email me if you want to discuss project ideas!

Regards,

Aditya

Announcing the individual assignment

Posted by Aditya Joshi Friday 01 March 2024, 12:01:40 PM.

Dear all,

The individual assignment for COMP6713 will be available to you in Moodle from 1pm today. Look for 'Individual Assignment' on the course page for the assignment description and related files. The assignment is an assessment to be completed on your own .

Deadline: 18th March 2024, 17:00 Sydney time

The assignment will need to uploaded to the same Moodle page by the deadline.

Good luck, and hope you enjoy working on the assignment!

Regards,

Aditya

Link to the Google Cloud Credit

Posted by Aditya Joshi Tuesday 27 February 2024, 10:32:37 AM.

Dear all,

Hope you are enjoying COMP6713 so far!

As mentioned in the first lecture, here is the link to the Google Cloud credit, primarily intended to be used for the COMP6713 group project. You may explore the offerings of the Google Cloud when deciding on your group project topics.

==

Here is the URL you will need to access to request a Google Cloud coupon. You will be asked to provide your school email address and name. An email will be sent to you to confirm these details before a coupon is sent to you.

Student Coupon Retrieval Link

• You will be asked for a name and email address, which needs to match your school domain. A confirmation email will be sent to you with a coupon code.Value: USD 50
• You can request a coupon from the URL and redeem it until: 6/12/2024
• Coupon valid through: 2/12/2025
• You can only request ONE code per unique email address.

==

• Value: USD 50
• The coupon is only to be used by students enrolled in COMP6713. Do not share it with people who are not enrolled.

Please contact me if you have any questions or issues.

Regards,

Aditya

Quiz for week 2 - have you completed it yet?

Posted by Aditya Joshi Thursday 22 February 2024, 01:15:38 PM.

Hi all,

The quiz for week 2 is now open in Moodle and will remain so until Sunday 5:25pm. This is the first assessment for the course. Please remember to submit the quiz before the deadline.

Regards,

Aditya

P.S.: Weekly quizzes are a part of the assessment for the course and will run from Tuesday 5:25pm to Sunday 5:25pm in the corresponding weeks. I may not send a reminder notice for each quiz. :)

Venue change for today: Old Main Building G32 (K-K15-G32)

Posted by Aditya Joshi Monday 19 February 2024, 09:24:51 AM.

Dear all,

Our class today will be held in Old Main Building G32 (K-K15-G32).

See you there!

Regards,

Aditya

Tutorial 1 now Available

Posted by Lihua Wang Sunday 18 February 2024, 05:50:46 PM.

Hello Everyone, I hope you had a great weekend!

Please note that tutorials will start next week. The tutorial material can now be found on Webcms under the heading Course Work -> Tutorials -> Week 2 . Please look through tutorial questions before attending.

Looking forward to seeing you all in tutorials!

Lihua

Revisiting week 1

Posted by Aditya Joshi Wednesday 14 February 2024, 10:44:29 AM.

Dear all,

It was great to see some of you in the class during the lectures this week. If you were unable to make it, I trust that you have made time to watch the lecture recordings available on Echo360 via Moodle. Seeing that the lectures are a mixture of technical content (with occasional dad jokes) with linguistic exercises, mathematics and coding demos, I hope you see value in attending lectures in person.

In week 2’s lectures, we will discuss representation learning in NLP. We might also have a guest talk which is best experienced live - another incentive to attend in person! :)

Do reach out on the forum here or on email if you have any questions for me. The tutors will be able to help you as well.

Regards,

Aditya

P.S.1: Lecture handouts and the demo notebooks are available on webcms. However, due to file size limits in webcms, the full version of slides is being uploaded on Moodle. You can use either - they are the same.

P.S.2: Note that lectures AND tutorials will be held from week 2 onwards. The first online assessment (a Moodle-based quiz) will open on Tuesday evening, as discussed in class.

Quiz and tuts start from week 2

Posted by Aditya Joshi Monday 12 February 2024, 03:49:55 PM, last modified Monday 12 February 2024, 03:50:34 PM.

Hi all,

There will be no quiz or tutorial in week 1.

Tutorials will be held as usual in week 2. The online quiz will open on Tuesday evening in week 2 - we will discuss the specifics tomorrow.

COMP6713: Welcome!

Posted by Aditya Joshi Friday 09 February 2024, 08:01:00 PM.

Dear all,

Welcome to COMP6713: Natural Language Processing , which is making its debut in 2024 Term 1!

Over the next ten weeks, we will see how computer programs can process human language, which, by the way, did not begin with ChatGPT! The COMP6713 team consists of tutors (Saurav, Lihua, and Xiangyu), and me: your lecturer for the course. We will use WebCMS as the discussion forum.

Some quick reminders:

• This is an in-person course. Recordings will be available on Echo360, but I encourage you to attend the lectures.
• We will run tutorials and online quizzes starting week 2. Please complete them on time.
• There will be one consultation session every week with me on Mondays from 4-5pm. We may add more consultations if there is more demand.
• Please make good use of this forum to ask questions.

Our first lecture is on Monday, 12th February, at 12:00pm in Old Main Building 150 (K-K15-150). See you there!

Regards,

Aditya