Natural Language Processing

Homework #2 has been posted, and is due on September 24th at midnight. Start early, and email me questions as soon as you have them!

Here are the solutions to Thursday’s XP-bearing in-class activity. (Btw, these solutions also contain calculations for “perplexity,” a concept we’ll address on Tuesday.)

Send questions!

I have finally posted the solution to the penultimate reading check.

And finally, the solution to our last linear algebra reading check.

Great job everyone! Now we can use the power of linear algebra as a tool to make next-generation NLP applications.

Some exciting upcoming CPSC department events: please consider attending! (DATA majors are warmly welcome to attend, just as CPSC majors are.)

• Monday = CyberClub Interest Meeting @ 6:00 in HCC 111
• Weds = GMU Accellerated Grad Program Info Session @ noon in Farmer 041 (free pizza)
• Weds = UMW CPSC/CYBR Internship Panel @ 4:00 in Farmer 036
• Thurs = DiverCS Trivia Night & Snacks @ 5:00 in Farmer 054

	True story: E.L. James was the first person ChatGPT listed when I asked it, “give me an example of a really popular, but also really bad, writer.” (Apologies to any Twilight or Fifty Shades fans.)
	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in many genres, actually, but will of course forever be linked with his “Sherlock Holmes” (and “Dr. Watson”) detective characters.

I only now just realized that yesterday’s reading check did not actually include reading material on matrix multiplication! D’oh!!! That information is in chapter 6, and shouldn’t have appeared until the Sep 11th reading check. *Sigh*.

Obviously I will give everybody full credit for quiz items 5c, 5d, 5g, and 5h, which required that knowledge.

(Sorry guys; it’s either age or stress or both.)

For those who haven’t done this, or who maybe have forgotten, here’s the “right” way to get access to the materials in the class github repository: clone your own copy of it.

On Windows, one way to do this is first to install “WSL” (“Windows Subsystem for Linux”) before proceeding with the instructions below; this can be accomplished by opening a “power shell” and typing “wsl --install” (or “wsl --install -d ubuntu” if that didn’t work). Then, after restarting your computer, you should be able to type wsl at the “Start” menu to get a Linux-y shell which will accept the commands below.

Okay then, assuming you’re set up on Mac, Linux, or Windows-with-WSL, type:

git clone git@github.com:divilian/data470.git

or, if you’ve never set up github SSH keys before:

git clone https://github.com/divilian/data470.git

If you get a message like “git: command not found“, you’ll need to install git. On Windows-with-WSL, that should be: “sudo apt update” followed by “sudo apt install git -y”

After successfully doing this, there should be a folder/directory called “data470” on your computer, in which are all the contents of the class repo, including the stuff I posted yesterday. From that point on, whenever I post something new, you can go into this folder/directory and type: “git pull” and it will always update your computer with the latest.

I have posted a solution to the third reading check.

The first “real” (40XP-worth) homework has been posted, and is due at the stroke of midnight Sunday September 14th. All questions are welcome!