COMP6713 Notices

Reminder: Have you registered a group project team yet?

Posted by Aditya Joshi Wednesday 18 March 2026, 11:54:02 AM.

Dear all,

[If you have registered a project team already, this notice does not apply to you.]

This is a gentle reminder that the form to indicate that you are looking for a project team (please refer to the webcms notice posted by the course admin for the link to the form) is due by 18 March 2026, 5:00pm (Sydney time). At the time of sending this email, I have assigned project groups to all students who have filled the form.

After the deadline: We will not be assigning any group project teams, and the project scope form will also not accept any responses. This implies that you will not be able to complete the group project and consequently (and unfortunately) receive zero marks for the group project component of the course.

Please reach out to cs6713@cse.unsw.edu.au if you have any questions.

Regards,

Aditya

Group Allocation Form for Students Without a Group

Posted by Dipankar Srirag 📸 Sunday 15 March 2026, 05:39:22 PM.

Dear students,

If you have not yet joined a group for the COMP6713 project, please complete the form linked below so that we can assign you to a project group.

Form link: https://forms.office.com/r/EkfUcbkxBR

Deadline to complete the form:

18 March 2026, 5:00pm (Sydney time)

After the deadline, the course team will allocate students into groups based on the responses received.

Once groups have been assigned, each group will have 5 days to submit their project description through the project registration form. Groups may also choose to upload their scope document at that time.

Please note that groups that do not submit their project description within this 5-day window will not be able to proceed with the group project , as the course team needs this information to plan project assessment and allocate assessors.

If you already have a registered group, you do not need to complete this form.

If you have any questions, please contact cs6713@cse.unsw.edu.au.

Regards,
Dipankar Srirag
Aditya Joshi

COMP6713 - Google Cloud Credits

Posted by Aditya Joshi Tuesday 10 March 2026, 06:40:08 PM.

Dear Students,

To help your computing requirements for the group projects in COMP6713, we are providing a Google Cloud Coupon worth USD 50, made available as Google Cloud Education Credits. Below is the URL you will need to access in order 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.
• You can request a coupon from the URL and redeem it until: 6/9/2026
• Coupon valid through: 2/9/2027
• You can only request ONE code per unique email address.

Please contact me if you have any questions or issues.

Please note that the course team is unable to provide technical support to set up or run your Google Cloud account.

Regards,

Aditya

Group Project

Posted by Dipankar Srirag 📸 Friday 06 March 2026, 07:44:36 PM.

Hello everyone,

Hope you are enjoying the course so far and are excited to apply what you have been learning to the group project .

If you have not already done so, this is a good time to finalise your project groups and register them using the project registration form: https://forms.office.com/r/c5R5BddBZF

As a reminder:

• Each group should consist of 5 members .
• Only one member per group needs to submit the form on behalf of the entire team.
• If a group has fewer than 5 members , the course team may assign additional members so that all students are accommodated.

The group registration deadline is: 13 March 2026, 11:59 pm (Sydney time).

Along with registering your group, you may also upload your completed scope document through the same form. Uploading the scope document at this stage is optional , but we strongly encourage it . If you submit it, the course team will have the opportunity to:

• review your proposed project scope, and
• provide feedback on its feasibility and alignment with the project expectations .

This can help ensure that the project is appropriately scoped for a 3-week effort by a team of 5 students . The scope document template is available on WebCMS . Only one person per team should submit the form and upload the scope document on behalf of the group.

If you have any questions, please contact cs6713@cse.unsw.edu.au .

All the best!
~ Dipankar

Assignment: Response to questions (2/n)

Posted by Dipankar Srirag 📸 Friday 06 March 2026, 05:30:04 PM.

Assignment: Response to questions (2/n)

Hello everyone,

Thank you for the questions and discussion on the forum. I would like to clarify one point from the previous announcement regarding the execution environment during automatic evaluation.

You may assume that internet access will be available during grading . This means that if your implementation requires downloading permitted resources at runtime (for example, pretrained embeddings available through the gensim downloader), your code may do so.

However, the following constraints from the assignment specification still apply:

• You must not use any additional training data beyond the provided dataset ( data.csv ) for building your models or statistics.
• You must not use transformer-based models or their pretrained weights (e.g., BERT, GPT, etc.).
• Pretrained resources such as GloVe, gensim embeddings, spaCy models, NLTK resources, and WordNet may be used to assist with semantic similarity or candidate generation.

As a reminder, your submission must be self-contained and include only:

• zid.py
• zid.pdf

packaged together inside zid.zip .

If your code requires downloading permitted resources, please ensure that this is handled automatically within your program and does not require any manual setup.

Regards,
Dipankar

Assignment: Response to questions (1/n)

Posted by Dipankar Srirag 📸 Thursday 05 March 2026, 11:31:20 AM, last modified Friday 06 March 2026, 04:29:55 PM.

Hello everyone,

It is great to see that you started working on the assignment, and have similar questions, particularly around what counts as training data and what external resources are allowed.

For this assignment, the dataset we provided (data.csv) should be used to build any models, statistics, or heuristics that help you identify which words in a sentence should be replaced. You are free to use any reasonable method for this part, but please do not use large pretrained transformer models such as BERT, GPT, etc .

Regarding pretrained embeddings and lexical resources , you are allowed to use tools such as GloVe, gensim embeddings, spaCy (including models like en_core_web_sm), NLTK and WordNet . These can be used to help identify suitable replacement words or compute semantic similarity. However, they should not be used as additional training data for your model.

Please also make sure that your submission is self-sufficient and runs without any manual changes to it when running automatic tests. Your submission should contain only:

• zid.py
• zid.pdf

packaged together in zid.zip.

Finally, we have uploaded a small set of unit tests on Moodle. The unit tests are provided only for your own qualitative testing , and you are allowed to add your examples to the file. You can use them to check whether your approach produces reasonable outputs. The automatic marking tests and the corresponding setup is not being shared.

Hope this helps clarify things. If you still have questions, please feel free to post on the forum. All the best!

Regards,
Dipankar

Individual assignment

Posted by Aditya Joshi Tuesday 03 March 2026, 07:44:29 AM.

Dear all,

The individual assignment (description, data, etc.) is now available on Moodle. The assignment is due by Friday, 20 March 2026, 5:00 PM .

Please upload your submissionto the appropriate place in Moodle, and do not email your files to the course team.

Good luck!

Regards,

Aditya

COMP6713 consultation

Posted by Aditya Joshi Tuesday 17 February 2026, 09:27:00 AM.

Hi all,

I will be running a consultation every Tuesday from 13:30 to 14:30 starting this week until week 10.

Please utilise this time to seek clarifications about either the technical content or admin details of COMP6713.

In-person: 217B in K17 building UNSW Kensington

Online: Please email cs6713@cse.unsw.edu.au close the time to schedule an online call.

Regards,

Aditya

Welcome to COMP6713: Natural Language Processing (T1 2026)

Posted by Dipankar Srirag 📸 Saturday 14 February 2026, 07:43:00 PM, last modified Saturday 14 February 2026, 07:43:33 PM.

Dear all,

Welcome to COMP6713: Natural Language Processing in 2026 Term 1!

Over the next ten weeks, we will explore and understand how computers process human (natural) language. The COMP6713 team is led by lecturer-in-charge: Aditya Joshi , with the help of course administrator Dipankar Srirag (myself), and tutors: Austin, Amrita, Freya, Liangji, Martin, Mingqin, Rahul .

Some quick reminders:

• This is a hybrid course (in-person/online) with weekly lectures and tutorials. Lecture recordings will be available on Echo360 .
• You will be required to also participate in weekly quizzes, in addition to other assessments.
• The WebCMS portal contains lecture slides and tutorial material. Material for Week 1 has been added to WebCMS , and will continue to be uploaded over the weekend in subsequent weeks.
• The course will use WebCMS forum as a place to ask questions of the course team and also to discuss lecture/tutorial content. We will not be monitoring other student forums.
• There will be no tutorial in Week 1.
• For any other queries, please reach out to the course email: cs6713@cse.unsw.edu.au

Our first lecture is on Monday, 16th February, 2026, at 4:00pm in Mathews Theatre B . See you there!

Regards,
Dipankar Srirag
Aditya Joshi (Aditya/Adi)