Middle term
10 Oct 2016TL;DR: Take-home midterm, out Friday, due Wednesday.
We are almost to the middle of the semester. It is hard to imagine that. However, this means that we are also coming up on the promised midterm. The midterm was supposed to be Monday in class, according to the schedule. You may guess that my phrasing it that way suggests that I’m rethinking that.
Format of the midterm
Generally speaking, I don’t think the stuff we’ve been doing really lends itself that well to an in-class midterm. This is in significant part a “practical” course, and perhaps even more so here in this first half. I could provide a written test, though most of what we’ve been doing is getting Python on the computer to obey our commands. So, it seems more appropriate for the test to be (at least in part) in the same Python environment we’ve been working in. But the classes are 50 minutes long, and one technical mishap and half the time evaporates. So, to relieve the time pressure, etc., the midterm will be a “take-home.”
It is still a midterm, not a homework, and it will be midterm-sized, not homework-sized. It should still take about an hour, not several, and it won’t be on new things but testing your facility with what we have covered, with possibly some slight extensions.
So, the plan is: I will provide you with the midterm on Friday, and it will be due by class on Wednesday. Friday will still be a review day, but Monday will be a regular day when we will start new things, and Wednesday I intend to give out the next homework.
What have we done?
The topics in the schedule and what has been mentioned in class are what I will draw the midterm material from.
The sections of the NLTK book below are what I will restrict my attention to. We also talked a bit about CHILDES, which is not in the book, though we did not get too far with it. But I still might ask something about it, so be familiar with basically what it is and what we did with it.
| Chapter 1 | basic corpora, frequency distributions |
| Chapter 2 | working with corpora, conditional frequency distributions, pronunciation corpus, WordNet |
| Chapter 3, sec. 9 | formatting output |
| Chapter 4, sec. 1-4 | basic Python, variables, functions |
| Chapter 8, sec. 1-4.3 | parsing with grammars |
Generally speaking, if we actually talked about something in the classroom or it was involved in a homework, it has a relatively high likelihood of coming up in the midterm. If it was in the readings mentioned above and we didn’t talk about it directly, it still might come up, but the likelihood is smaller. So, preparing by re-reading those parts of the book would be sensible. Preferably before Friday so you can ask questions about anything you’re not clear about.
The midterm will ask you how to do some basic things in Python and with NLTK, and will set up a couple of problems to consider, describe, or solve. I will provide the ground rules with the midterm, but this is not going to be a “closed-book test” of any sort. You’ll want to know the material basically, but if you forget a detail but know where to find it, you can look it up. (You can’t ask your roommate/classmate, but you can look it up.) What I want you to do mostly is understand how it works and why we’re doing it, and I will try to focus the questions on that. But, really, in real life after this course, if you want to do something with NLP, you would look it up. I want you to be able to find things and look them up efficiently, but there’s no real point in memorizing things just to take a test on them.