Various Updates

Earlier this week, we had posted the first half of our final obligatory assignment, Problem Set (3a), which has a submission deadline on Sunday, November 1.

In the lecture today, we have introduced the core notions of Hidden Markov Models and the Viterbi Algorithm; this is enough for you to start working on Problem (3a), so why wait?

I corrected some typos in the slides posted to the course web page after the lecture; hence, please make sure to fetch the latest version.  The screencast is still being processing and will hopefully become available sometime tomorrow.

We further posted reading suggestions for the next several weeks to the on-line course schedule; as always, we would kindly ask that you at least take a good deep look at the relevant parts of our reading list prior to the lecture.

Also today, we have sent everyone who had submitted something for the first obligatory assignment an on-line invitation (nettskjema) for a short, anonymous questionnaire, asking for feedback on the course this far and suggestions for revisions.  Please take the five or so minutes to answer on-line, please be critical and constructive, and please forgive the somewhat mis-leading text of the invitations emails (copied and pasted from an earlier year).  In case you have not received the invitation, please contact inf4820-help@ifi.uio.no.

The questionnaire is open until noon next Wednesday (October 21), and we will briefly summarize the aggregated results in the next lecture (that same day).

Also next week, we will hold a quiz on basic probability theory, n-gram language models, and Hidden Markov Models.  Unlike in previous rounds, we will ask that you complete the quiz individually first, and we will be awarding bonus points against exam qualification (rather than chocolates) for correct answers.