DATA 441/641: Applied Natural Language Processing

American University

This is a complementary course hub. Canvas is the official site for this semester. Questions: mousavi@american.edu.

Syllabus

Thursday class meetings, 5:30–8:00 PM. Canvas is official for submissions and any date changes.

Week	Topic	Notes
1	NLP in the real world and Python
2	Data acquisition and preprocessing
3	Feature engineering, modeling, and evaluation
4	Text representation
5	Deep learning and Word2Vec
6	Text classification
7	CNNs for text
8	Recurrent neural networks
9	Midterm review	Midterm
10	Information extraction
11	Named entity recognition
12	Chatbots and dialog systems
13	SVD and topic modeling
14	LDA and NMF topic models
15	Summarization, translation, and recommenders

Open a week for its lectures, labs, readings, and discussion prompts. Canvas remains the official list of required reading.

Week	Topic
1	NLP in the real world and Python
2	Data acquisition and preprocessing
3	Feature engineering, modeling, and evaluation
4	Text representation
5	Deep learning and Word2Vec
6	Text classification
7	CNNs for text
8	Recurrent neural networks
9	Midterm review
10	Information extraction
11	Named entity recognition
12	Chatbots and dialog systems
13	SVD and topic modeling
14	LDA and NMF topic models
15	Summarization, translation, and recommenders

Resource	What it is for
Python	Install Python
Jupyter	Notebooks for labs
NLTK	Classic NLP toolkit
Practical Natural Language Processing	Main textbook (Vajjala, Majumder, Gupta, Surana)
Deep Learning with Python	Neural nets (Chollet)