Introduction to Large Language Models

Announcements

• First class on October 16!

Table of Contents

Course Information

• Instructors:
  • Lectures: Frank Niu;
  • Practice Sessions: Hovhannes Tamoyan and Hassan Soliman.
• Course Information Sheet.

When and Where

Assignments

Important Links

Schedule & Class Materials

• Textbook for the course.

  • [J&M] Jurafsky and Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd edition (2025 draft).
    • Textbook Website.
    • Some chapters are not yet available for the third edition. In this case, we will use the corresponding chapters from the 2nd edition (available online here).

  This book is available online for free, so the physical copy is optional.

  • [Kracht] Markus Kracht, Introduction to Linguistics.
    • We will use the first few chapters of this book to cover some basic linguistics concepts.

Week 1. Introduction

• Date: 14.10.2025

• Readings:

  • [J&M, 2nd Edition] Chapter 1: Introduction.

• Slides:

  • Lecture Slides

• Practice Sessions:

  • Date: 16.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 2. CL/NLP Basics

• Date: 21.10.2025
• Readings:
  • [Kracht] Chapter 1: Introduction
  • [J&M] Chapter 2: Words and Tokens
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 3. Word Representation I: Basics

• Date: 28.10.2025
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Section 11.1: Information Retrieval
  • [J&M] Chapter 3: N-gram Language Models
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 4. Word Representation II: Statistical Methods

• Date: 04.11.2025
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Chapter 5: Embeddings
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 5. “Language Models”

• Date: 11.11.2025
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Chapter 7: Large Language Models
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 6. Transformers / BERT

• Date: 18.11.2025
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Chapter 8: Transformers
  • [J&M] Chapter 10: Masked Language Models
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 7. Natural Language Understanding

• Date: 25.11.2025
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Chapter 20: Information Extraction: Relations, Events, and Time
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 8. Post-Training

• Date: 02.12.2025
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Section 9.1-3: Post-training: Instruction Tuning and Alignment
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 9. Prompting Techniques

• Date: 09.12.2025
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Section 9.4: Test-time Compute
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 10. Interpretability

• Date: 16.12.2025

• Readings:

• Slides:

  • Lecture Slides: TBA

• Practice Sessions:

  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

🎅 Winter Break 🎄

Week 11. Information Retrieval

• Date: 13.01.2026
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Chapter 11: Information Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 12. Question Answering and RAG

• Date: 20.01.2026
• Readings:
  • [J&M] Chapter 11: Information Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA
• Practice Sessions:
  • Date: 23.10.2025
  • Materials: TBA

Week 13. Quantisation

• Date: 27.01.2026
• Readings:
  • [J&M 2nd Edition] Sections 23.2,5: Question Answering
  • [J&M] Sections 11.3-6: Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA

Week 14. Career in NLP & Exam Preparation

• Date: 03.02.2026
• Slides:
  • Lecture Slides: TBA

Final Exam Information

More details to be announced.

Resources

Instructions

More details to be announced.

Recordings

More details to be announced.