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Hi, everyone.
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We know that most of you still working really hard on the last couple of assignments and problem sets
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but nevertheless our NLP class is coming to its close and so we thought we’ll both update you on a few of the issues.
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And first of all, everyone is always interested in numbers
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so let’s say a bit about the numbers.
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So, it seems like, as we come into week 7’s material of the problem sets and programming assignments,
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it seems like there are about 5,000 people still actively watching the videos
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and about 2,000 people doing all the work of the homeworks.
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But that’s, you know, overall it’s just been an enormous amount of stuff going on
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so it now have well over a million video views and all.
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Yeah, it’s very exciting.
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Programming homework six, the parsing homework, was definitely our hardest homework so far
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and there were definitely problems with the code being under-commented
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so we appreciate very much those of you who helped out each other in the forums
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and made things very clear for each other.
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Those of you who managed to finish the homework have told us they got a lot out of it.
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But those of you who didn’t have the time to do all of it,
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we encourage you to do come back and do programming homework seven and eight
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which are much easier than homework six and should be a lot fun as well.
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One of the things that some people have been asking about is,
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“Hey, can we take those great parsers that we did write for programming assignment six
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and keep on working on them by posting them on Github or some other site like that?”
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There is a slight problem with that because, you know,
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we are hoping that we’ll be able to do this course again some time in the future
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and we’d like to be able to reuse some of the assignments
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so I’d really prefer that there just aren’t great solutions to all the assignments sitting on the open web
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and to keep some of that stuff on the forum sites for the class.
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So, it’s great that people want to keep exploring and doing better things for NLP
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but we’d really think it’s probably a better idea for you
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to pick up one of the several open source NLP frameworks that’re out there
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and look at ways in which you can contribute to that
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’cause that both doesn’t sort of conflict with our assignments
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but that’s actually going to be more useful for you and people around the world in general
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if you’re helping along these open source frameworks.
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So there are good ones — For Python NLTK is the best-known one;
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and there are several well-known Java NLP open source frameworks
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which certainly includes our own Stanford NLP tools
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but also other things like OpenNLP, the GATE NLP Framework;
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components: UIMA — a bunch of stuff out there if you look around.
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Okay and that brings up the issue of what’s going to happen with this class website after the class ends.
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It is going to stay open and available
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and all you guys will be able to keep on looking at stuff and referencing things
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and even beyond that, what we’re also going to have is this going to be available in an archive mode.
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So, people who haven’t been registered in the class
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will also be able to look at the content in terms of the videos that are up there
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but not the programming assignments
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which we are kind of going to keep to the people who were enrolled in the class.
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But you shouldn’t worry about things going away.
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Yes and those of you who are enrolled can still —
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the forum will stay up —
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we encourage you to continue to talk to each other on the forums.
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Those of you who never got to finish some of the homeworks,
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keep working on the homeworks,
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go ahead and post them. The site will stay up.
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And then for new people we will eventually be teaching the class again
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but meanwhile we’ll be leaving the videos up
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so if your friends want to watch the videos, we encourage that.
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And then eventually we’ll actually teach the class again.
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In fact for everybody, it’s been really helpful on the forums there —
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we mentioned this earlier about helping people out with the code,
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helping people out with basic NLP.
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It’s been very supportive community and we really appreciate that and we think it’s really great.
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We’d like help from you in suggesting —
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you have already given us suggestions for next year but I’ve put up a forum just now
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that we’d like you, give us specific suggestions about ways we can make the course better for next year.
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We know Homework six is one of them
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but there’s lot of suggestions you’ve given about improving the problem sets
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or other reading material we can suggest
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or anything else that will help us improve our course for the second time we teach it
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that would be great.
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We all have dreams of the future where there are computers with full natural language understanding
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and in our research we still variously hoped to work to those goals
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but in terms of the practical NLP that’s deployed around the world at the moment,
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really you guys are just seeing the ton of the stuff that are actually used.
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Things like text classifiers, building sequence classifiers, named entities and other things,
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parsers, questions answering, machine techniques,…
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So you really should feel good if you’ve made your way through this class
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that you are a competent practitioner of the kind of useful NLP techniques
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that’re leading to a new class of more intelligent language-wielding computer applications
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and so we hope that you’ll be able to take these ideas and knowledge,
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and go off and apply them in many different places.
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We clearly are in this world now where human language material is just everywhere over the web
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as part of the new move to the content authoring and social computing that’s going on everywhere.
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So much of that is about language use.
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So now you have a good toolkit to be able to go off and do things with that material
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and we hope that you’ll be able to find good things to do.
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Yeah. Thanks for taking the class and look forward to seeing you wherever and whenever we see you.
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Thanks a lot.
