Course policies

Grading

For the students that take the class for three hours credit, the grade is composed of the following three components:

We reserve the right to lower your overall grade if at the end of the semester your performance in any of these three areas is below 20% of the maximal number of points that can be obtained. We reserve the right to improve your grade by up to 5 percent based on your in-class participation. That is, if you are in between two grades, but you frequently participated in in-class discussions, we will give you the higher grade.

For the students that take the class for four hours credit, the grade is composed of four components:

The first three components are identical for all students. Again, we reserve the right to lower your overall grade if we judge your project to be significantly below what we expect students to achieve. And, again, we also reserve the right to improve your grade by up to 5 percent based on your in-class participation. That is, if you are in between two grades, but you frequently participated in in-class discussions, we will give you the higher grade.

Homework

The homework assignments will mostly consist of programming exercises. All of our programming assignments will be done in Python 3.4. You can learn more about Python by reading the documentation.You will need a EWS account to do some of the assignments, as the required software and data will be installed on the EWS Linux machines. On the EWS Linux machines, you should use the Enthought Canopy distribution of Python, which comes with all the required packages preinstalled. In particular, we will also be using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) 3 for at least some of our assignments. NLTK comes with Canopy.

HW0 is just a warmup exercise, so you will only get up to 2 points for it, whereas HW1, HW2, HW3 and HW4 will each be worth 10 points. Your Homework grade will be computed as a percentage out of these 42 points.

You will need to document your code.

All assignments will be submitted via Compass.

Exams

The exams will cover material covered in the required reading and the lectures. The final exam will only cover material from the second half of the course. The midterm and final exam may have a different number of points, but you will again get a percentage for each of them. Both exams are closed-book exams. No electronic devices, books or cheat sheets will be allowed.
Projects/Literature Reviews For the fourth credit hour, you will need to do a small research project (with a writeup that discusses relevant original research papers) or a somewhat larger literature survey, to be submitted at the end of the semester.

Academic integrity: You are encouraged to discuss homework assignments, but you must write your own solutions (this includes any code that is not explicitly provided with the assignments). If you are taking the course for 4 hours credit, your research project or literature survey must also be your own work. The report must be written in your own words. You must properly cite all sources that have been consulted, including papers, text books, websites and existing software.