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