Natural Language Understanding and Computational Semantics

Course ID
DS-GA 1012
Term
Lecture
Tuesdays, 6:45 PM–8:25 PM, with Sophie.
Room G08, 12 Waverly Place and on Zoom.
Lab
Wednesdays, 7:10 PM–8:00 PM, with Cara or Jackson.
Room 102, 19 University Place and on Zoom.
Office Hours
Tuesdays, 4:00 PM–5:00 PM, with Jackson.
Room 507, Arthur L. Carter Hall (10 Washington Place). Wednesdays, 4:00 PM–5:00 PM, with Cara.
Room 307, Arthur L. Carter Hall (10 Washington Place). Fridays, 11:00 AM–12:00 PM, with Sophie.
Room 700, 60 5th Avenue and on Zoom.
Course Website
https://nyu-dsga1012-s24.github.io/

Course Description

Since at least the proposal of the Turing test, building computational systems that can communicate with humans using natural language has been a central goal for Al research. Understanding real, naturally occurring human language is the key to reaching this goal. This course surveys recent successes in language understanding and prepares students to do original research in this area, culminating with a substantial final project.

My Labs

2024 Jan 31
Sentiment classification using a multi-layer perceptron.
2024 Feb 14
Paper Reading. slides.
2024 Feb 28
Prompting, Testing GPT-4’s color perception. slides.
2024 Mar 13
Linguistics, What Is Language? slides.
2024 Apr 3
Transformers: A Social History. slides.
2024 Apr 17
Practice talks.
2024 May 1
Esoteric Topics in Language Modeling, What Is Understanding? slides.