Natural Language Processing and Text Mining, Spring 2026 (Undergraduates)

This course introduces the basic concepts in natural language processing and the applications in text mining. This is offered as an elective course in the undergraduate program.

Course Information

Instructor: Jenq-Haur Wang
E-mail: jhwang AT <the domain for our school>
Office: R1534, Technology Building, ext. 4238
Office Hours: Tue & Fri. 9:10-12:00am
Class Hours: Mon. 15:10-16:00pm, Thu. 10:10-12:00am, R325, Sixth Teaching Building
TA: (TBD) (R1424, Technology Building)
Textbook:
- Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin. 2026. Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition with Language Models, 3rd edition. Online manuscript released January 6, 2026. https://web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/slp3.
References:
- Chris Manning and Hinrich Schütze, Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: May 1999.

Latest News

Feb. 3, 2026: The homepage for Natural Language Processing and Text Mining (Spring 2026, Undergraduates) has been set up.

Tentative Schedule

NOTE: The tentative schedule and the slides are subject to changes.

Week	Date	Content	Homework
1	Feb. 23 & 26, 2026	Course Overview
2	Mar. 2 & 5, 2026	Introduction to NLP Ch.2 - Words and Tokens Edit Distance
3	Mar. 9 & 12, 2026	Ch.3, N-gram Language models
4	Mar. 16 & 19, 2026	Ch.4, Logistic Regression and Text Classification
5	Mar. 23 & 26, 2026	Ch.5, Embeddings	HW#1
6	Mar. 30 & Apr. 2, 2026	Ch.6, Neural Networks
7	Apr. 6 & 9, 2026	(4/6: Compensation Leave for Tomb Sweeping Day)	Due: HW#1
8	Apr. 13 & 16, 2026	Ch.7, Large Language Models Ch.17, Sequence labeling for POS and NER (introduction only)
9	Apr. 20 & 23, 2026	(4/23: Midterm Exam -- Ch.1-7, 17)	HW#2
10	Apr. 27 & 30, 2026	Ch.8, Transformers (introduction only)	Term project proposal
11	May 4 & 7, 2026	Ch.13, RNNs & LSTMs (introduction only)	Due: HW#2
12	May 11 & 14, 2026	Ch.11, Information Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation	5/8 Due: Term project proposal
13	May 18 & 21, 2026	Part II: Introduction to Text Mining Embeddings
14	May 25 & 28, 2026	Phrase Mining	HW#3
15	Jun. 1 & 4, 2026	Named Entity Recognition (NER) Pattern-based text mining
16	Jun. 8 & 11, 2026	Term project presentation	Due: HW#3
17	Jun. 15 & 18, 2026	Term project presentation
18	Jun. 22 & 25, 2026	Term project presentation

Homework Assignments

Please hand in your homework in paper form or in electronic files before deadline.
Programs or homework in electronic files must be submitted to me via our submission site as follows:

Program Submission Site: iSchool+
User Account: your account in Taipei Tech Portal
Program Uploading: Please compress source codes and documentation in a .zip file, and clearly name your program files.
Note: If your program needs special environment or tool to compile or run, please write documentation about it.

There will be around 3-4 homeworks during this semester.

HW#1: Sentiment classification
HW#2: Similarity estimation using Word embeddings
HW#3: Named Entity Recognition

If you have any questions about the homework, please contact with the TA and me via e-mail.

Exams

Midterm Exam: Apr. 20 - 24, 2026.
- Date: Apr. 23, 2026
- Time: 10:10-12:00am
- Location: R325, Sixth Teaching Building
- Range: Ch.1-7, 17 (TBD)
Final Exam: Jun. 22 - 26, 2026.

There will be no final exam for this course. Instead, we have the term project presentation in the last two to three weeks.

Score

E-mail: jhwang AT <the domain for our school>
Created: Feb. 3, 2026.
Last Updated: Feb. 3, 2026.