Fall 2026 (Sep8-Dec9)
Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University
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[ http://web.cs.dal.ca/~vlado/csci6509/coursecalendar.html ]
Fall 2026 (Sep8-Dec9) Faculty of Computer Science Dalhousie University |
September October November December
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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 w1 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 w5 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 rw 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 wD
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| # | Date | Title | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tu Sep 8 | Class cancelled on Tuesday | ||
| Part I: Introduction | |||
| 1 | Th Sep 10 | Course Introduction
Course introduction: logistics, administrivia, references, evaluation, policies, schedule; Introduction to NLP (reading Ch.1 [JM]): natural language and other languages, NLP applications, NLP as a research area, NLP Research Links and NLP Anthology http://aclweb.org/anthology/. Short history of NLP. NLP methodology overview. Levels of NLP. Files: Syllabus (PDF), slides, lecture notes. Reading: [JM] Ch.1 | A0 out |
| 2 | Fr Sep 11 | Course Project
Why is NLP hard? Ambiguities at different levels of NLP. About Course Project: topics and teams, deliverables, P0, P1, P, R. Files: slides, lecture notes. | |
| Part II: Stream-based Text Processing | |||
| 3 | Tu Sep 15 | Finite Automata Review
Part II: Stream-based Text Processing: Review of Finite Automata. Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA). Non-deterministic Finite Automata (NFA), and their use in NLP. NFA-to-DFA conversion. (Reading: Chapter 2 [JM]) Files: slides, lecture notes. Reading: [JM] Ch.2 | |
| 4 | Th Sep 17 | Regular Expressions and Perl Processing
NFA-to-DFA conversion (continued). Review of Regular Expressions. Introductionj to Perl. Regular Expressions (RegEx) use in Perl. Files: slides, lecture notes. Reading: On timberlea server `man perlretut' and `man perlre', or perlretut and perlre | |
| L1 | Fr Sep 18 | Lab 1: FCS Computing Environment, Perl Tutorial 1
Logging in using CSID, timberlea environment; Introduction to Perl programming language: basic syntax, variables, string literals, subroutines. Files: lab notes, slides. | A1 out |
| 5 | Tu Sep 22 | RegEx Based Processing Examples
Regular expressions in Perl and basic text processing; counting words ex., regex matching, counting sentences, advanced regex features, regex substitutions, letter frequencies ex. Files: slides, lecture notes. | |
| Tu Sep 22 | Last day to add/drop courses | A0 due | |
| 6 | Th Sep 24 | Characters, Words, and Tokens
Regular expressions in Python. More tokenizer examples. BPE (Byte-Pair Encoding) tokenizer. Characters and Unicode. Word counting. Files: slides, lecture notes. | |
| L2 | Fr Sep 25 | Lab 2: Regular Expressions and Perl Tutorial 2 Files: lab notes, slides. | |
| Fr Sep 25 | P0 Project Topic Proposal due | P0 due | |
| 7 | Tu Sep 29 | Text Classification | |
| We Sep 30 | National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, University closed | ||
| 8 | Th Oct 1 | Similarity-based Classification | |
| L3 | Fr Oct 2 | Lab 3: Git and GitLab Tutorial | A1 due |
| Part III: Probabilistic and Machine Learning Approach to NLP | |||
| 9 | Tu Oct 6 | Introduction to Probabilistic NLP | |
| We Oct 7 | Last day to drop classes without "W", change audit to credit or vv. | ||
| 10 | Th Oct 8 | Naive Bayes Model | |
| L4 | Fr Oct 9 | Lab 4: Git and GitLab Tutorial | |
| Mo Oct 12 | Thanksgiving Day, University closed | ||
| 11 | Tu Oct 13 | N-gram Model and Markov Chain Model | |
| 12 | Th Oct 15 | POS Tagging and Hidden Markov Model | |
| L5 | Fr Oct 16 | Lab 5: Python NLTK Tutorial 1 | |
| 13 | Tu Oct 20 | P0 Topics Discussion | |
| 14 | Th Oct 22 | Bayesian Networks and HMM Inference | |
| L6 | Fr Oct 23 | Lab 6: Python Tutorial 2 | |
| 15 | Tu Oct 27 | Sum-Product Algorithms | |
| Part IV: Deep Learning Approach to NLP | |||
| 16 | Th Oct 29 | Neural Networks and NLP | |
| L8 | Fr Oct 30 | Lab 8: Python Tutorial with PyTorch | |
| Fr Oct 30 | P1 Project Statement due | P1 due | |
| 17 | Tu Nov 3 | Deep Learning Architectures for NLP | |
| 18 | Th Nov 5 | Deep Learning Architectures for NLP | |
| Th Nov 5 | Last day to drop classes with "W" | ||
| L9 | Fr Nov 6 | Lab 9: Hugging Face Tutorial | |
| Mo Nov 9 | Fall Study Break Nov 9-13, no classes, University open except Wed | ||
| We Nov 11 | Remembrance Day, University closed | ||
| Part V: Syntactic and Semantic Processing | |||
| 19 | Tu Nov 17 | Syntax Formalisms Review | |
| 20 | Th Nov 19 | Syntax of Natural Languages | |
| L | Fr Nov 20 | Lab | |
| 21 | Tu Nov 24 | Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar | |
| 22 | Th Nov 26 | DCG and Unification-based Grammars | |
| L | Fr Nov 27 | Lab | |
| 23 | Tu Dec 1 | Chart Parsing | |
| 24 | Th Dec 3 | Elements of Semantics | |
| L | Fr Dec 4 | Lab | |
| Part V: Student Presentations | |||
| Mo Dec 7 | Student Presentations | ||
| Tu Dec 8 | Student Presentations (Monday schedule) | ||
| We Dec 9 | Classes end, Report due | Report due | |
| Final Exam | |||
| ?? Dec ? | Final Exam (TBA)
Final exam, 3 hours; date, time, and location to be announced. Exam period: Dec 10 to Dec 20 (3 hour final exam); | F.Exam | |