CS 5740 - Natural Language Processing

Fall (Ithaca), Spring (NYC). 3-4 credits, variable; 3 credits at Cornell Tech. Fall: student option grading; Spring: letter grades only (no audit).

Prerequisite: CS 2110 or equivalent programming experience; Spring - CS 4780 and CS 4786, or CS 5785 or equivalent machine learning experience. Co-meets with COGST 4740/CS 4740/LING 4474 (Fall only). This course is programming intensive. Students should have strong familiarity with Python and ideally some form of numerical library (e.g., numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, torch, tensorflow). Students should have a strong understanding of foundational CS concepts such as memory requirements and computational complexity. Math: Students need to be comfortable with calculus and probability, primarily differentiation and basic discrete distributions. The course does not require proofs.

Fall: C. Cardie; Spring: Staff.

This course constitutes an introduction to natural language processing (NLP), the goal of which is to enable computers to use human languages as input, output, or both. NLP is at the heart of many of today’s most exciting technological achievements, including machine translation, automatic conversational assistants and Internet search. Possible topics include: methods for handling underlying linguistic phenomena (e.g., syntactic analysis, word sense disambiguation and discourse analysis) and vital emerging applications (e.g., machine translation, sentiment analysis, summarization and information extraction).