Natural Language Processing
(CSCI-SHU 376)
Spring 2026 | New York University Shanghai
Instructor
Hua Shen
Time
Tue/Thu 11:15 AM - 12:30 PM
Location
N401
Welcome! 🤗
Natural language processing (NLP), a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to read, understand and interpret human languages, is one of the most important technologies that have made significant progress recently. NLP has been applied to many areas such as machine translation, question answering, summarization, dialogue etc. The course will introduce students to the basics of NLP, including standard frameworks as well as algorithms and techniques to solve NLP problems, including recent deep learning approaches.
Overview
Office Hour
Hua Shen: 2:30 PM - 4:00 PM, Friday (or by appointment);
Office: S749; Zoom: https://nyu.zoom.us/my/hua.shen (Passcode: enQb9h)
Office: S749; Zoom: https://nyu.zoom.us/my/hua.shen (Passcode: enQb9h)
Prerequisite:
Required: Machine Learning, Calculus, Probability and Statistics;
Desirable/Helpful: Linear Algebra, Data Structures, Pytorch
Desirable/Helpful: Linear Algebra, Data Structures, Pytorch
Class Schedule
See NYU Shanghai's Course Syllabus for the tentative schedule, which is subject to change.
| Date | Theme | Topics | Reading Materials | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1
|
Jan 20 (Tue) | Overview |
Overview: NLP Landscape
Lecture 1
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|
|
1
|
Jan 22 (Thu) | Overview |
Course Objectives & Teaming Up
🎓 Project Proposal Start
Team Sheet
|
|
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2
|
Jan 27 (Tue) | Theme 1: Statistical and Feature-Based NLP |
N-Gram LMs
Lecture 2
|
|
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2
|
Jan 29 (Thu) | Theme 1: Statistical and Feature-Based NLP |
Text Classification & Log-Linear Models
🎓 Quiz 1
Lecture 3 |
|
|
3
|
Feb 3 (Tue) | Theme 2: Neural NLP |
Word Embeddings, Pytorch Foundation
🎓 Quiz 2
🎓 HW1 Out
|
|
|
3
|
Feb 5 (Thu) | Theme 2: Neural NLP |
Sequance Modeling & Neural Networks
🎓 Project Proposal Due
|
|
|
4
|
Feb 10 (Tue) | Theme 2: Neural NLP |
RNN & LSTM
|
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|
4
|
Feb 12 (Thu) | Theme 2: Neural NLP |
Sequence to Sequence Models
🎓 Quiz 3
|
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|
5
|
Feb 17 - Feb 19 |
💃🏻 Spring Festival Holiday - No Class
|
||
|
6
|
Feb 24 (Tue) |
NO CLASS, Meet Hua about Project Progress
🎓 HW1 Due
|
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|
6
|
Feb 26 (Thu) | Theme 3: Transformers & Pretraining |
Transformers
🎓 HW2 Out
|
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|
7
|
Mar 3 (Tue) | Theme 3: Transformers & Pretraining |
Contextualized representations and LM-pretraining
🎓 Quiz 4
|
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|
7
|
Mar 5 (Thu) | Theme 4: Foundation Models / LLMs |
LLM Pretraining and Instruction Finetuning
slides
|
|
|
8
|
Mar 10 (Tue) | Theme 4: Foundation Models / LLMs |
LLM in-context Learning and RLHF
|
|
|
8
|
Mar 12 (Thu) | Theme 4: Foundation Models / LLMs |
LLM Decoding
🎓 Quiz 5
|
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|
9
|
Mar 17 (Tue) | MIDTERM | 🎓 Midterm Exam 🎓 HW2 Due, HW3 Out | |
|
9
|
Mar 19 (Thu) | Theme 5: Open Research Directions of LLMs |
Retrieval-augmented LLM
|
|
|
10
|
Mar 24 (Tue) | Theme 5: Open Research Directions of LLMs |
LLM Reasoning
|
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|
10
|
Mar 26 (Thu) | Theme 5: Open Research Directions of LLMs |
Value Alignment of LLM
|
|
|
11
|
Mar 31 (Tue) |
🎓 Mid-Project Presentation I |
||
|
11
|
Apr 2 (Thu) |
🎓 Mid-Project Presentation II |
||
|
12
|
Apr 7 (Tue) |
💃🏻 Qingming Festival Holiday - No Class
|
||
|
12
|
Apr 9 (Thu) |
💃🏻 Qingming Festival Holiday - No Class
|
||
|
13
|
Apr 14 (Tue) |
CHI Conference - No Class
|
||
|
13
|
Apr 16 (Thu) |
CHI Conference - No Class
|
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|
14
|
Apr 21 (Tue) | Theme 6: Agentic LLMs |
LLM Agents
|
|
|
14
|
Apr 23 (Thu) | Theme 6: Agentic LLMs |
Multi-Agent Systems
|
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|
15
|
Apr 28 (Tue) | Theme 7: Speech Processing |
Speech Features and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
|
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|
15
|
Apr 30 (Thu) | Theme 7: Speech Processing |
Text-to-Speech
|
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|
16
|
May 5 (Tue) |
NO CLASS, Meet Hua about Project Progress
|
||
|
16
|
May 7 (Thu) |
🎓 Final-Project Presentation I |
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|
17
|
May 12 (Tue) |
🎓 Final-Project Presentation II |
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|
17
|
May 14 (Thu) |
🎓 Final-Project Presentation III |