Contemporary NLP Modeling in Six Comprehensive Programming Assignments

Greg Durrett, Jifan Chen, Shrey Desai, Tanya Goyal, Lucas Kabela, Yasumasa Onoe, Jiacheng Xu

Abstract
We present a series of programming assignments, adaptable to a range of experience levels from advanced undergraduate to PhD, to teach students design and implementation of modern NLP systems. These assignments build from the ground up and emphasize full-stack understanding of machine learning models: initially, students implement inference and gradient computation by hand, then use PyTorch to build nearly state-of-the-art neural networks using current best practices. Topics are chosen to cover a wide range of modeling and inference techniques that one might encounter, ranging from linear models suitable for industry applications to state-of-the-art deep learning models used in NLP research. The assignments are customizable, with constrained options to guide less experienced students or open-ended options giving advanced students freedom to explore. All of them can be deployed in a fully autogradable fashion, and have collectively been tested on over 300 students across several semesters.
Anthology ID:
2021.teachingnlp-1.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
David Jurgens, Varada Kolhatkar, Lucy Li, Margot Mieskes, Ted Pedersen
Venue:
TeachingNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
99–103
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.teachingnlp-1.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.teachingnlp-1.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Greg Durrett, Jifan Chen, Shrey Desai, Tanya Goyal, Lucas Kabela, Yasumasa Onoe, and Jiacheng Xu. 2021. Contemporary NLP Modeling in Six Comprehensive Programming Assignments. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP, pages 99–103, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Contemporary NLP Modeling in Six Comprehensive Programming Assignments (Durrett et al., TeachingNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.teachingnlp-1.17.pdf
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