Discussions (about the course or NLP in general)

Dear INLP students,

first of all, thanks to all the 47 students who took some time to complete our course evaluation. This is something important for us.

Here are the global results, which is not that good this year, less than last year (certainly due to this year adaptations of the content, not well finalized, sorry, and maybe a bit also because of quiz 2 [see remarks below]):

Martin classified your comment into several main categories. Here they are:

• Positive feedback:
  
  • about the course:

* Cours intéressant.
* interesting course
* I really like this course. The lectures are quite good. I feel that I learn a lot and that I understand why the different aspects are useful.
* Good structure overall.
* I like how the course is organised
* Nothing to say except that the course is well structured.
* Que du positif, le cours est très intéressant, les exos aussi.
* The content is interesting
* The course is good overall.
* Quizes help to keep up during semester
* The course is interesting and well taught for most classes. The homeworks and interactive classes are great. Having quizzes from time to time is a good idea.
* This course gives solid foundations in NLP. It is apparently more focused on Linguistics and concepts compared to past years and I appreciate it.
* Quizz allow for continuous check points, helping me to situate myself during the semester. References are provided at the end of the lectures for interested readers, which is a big plus.
* Very interesting content in the lectures. a great course.
* the contents of the course are in general interesting
* The course itself is interesting

* Good teaching.
* the professors are good at explaining the different aspects
* Nothing to say except that lecturers are good 
* The teachers are aware that some students have courses' overlaps during the two exercises hours and take it into consideration by trying to see the important things during the first two hours. This is greatly appreciated, thank you!
* The professors are reactive on Moodle and provide help and further informations when needed.
* lecturers are excellent and always do their best to help students understand notions.
* Prof. Chappelier is quite clear, 

• Negative feedback:
  • about  the course content:

* Not really connected to the real world state of the art techniques
* The content seems outdated
* Very theoretic course. It would be fun with more applied NLP.
* Weird course. The teachers only present very old and basic concepts than are not used anymore.
* the maths are a bit weird.

* Course is a bit slow
* Sometimes teachers are a bit slow with some basic examples
* Lectures could gain by being a bit more dynamic.
* The lectures advance too slowly, a lot of time is spent on reiterating very basic concepts. I stopped going to lectures and just read the slides at home.

* exams are very ambiguous, which is not great for a multiple choice quiz. Could definitely be improved.
* Évaluation (les quizzes pour le moment) difficile, presque sévère selon la volatilité des réponses possibles.
* The quiz questions were often ambiguous when they could have been more clearer. It would be helpful to have much more sessions where we answer example quiz questions together.
* In the quizzes questions are often ambiguous questions or not actually useful to test if a student studied or not
* Quiz questions are often ambiguous not on purpose. Different answer could be acceptable depending on the interpretation of the question. Although the quizzes don't have a high weight, this leads to frustration and is scary for the final exam.
* The only downside of this course is the ambiguity of some of the quizzes' questions we had.
* how is possible to answer so much ambiguous questions at quizzes? Please, don't make natural language more ambiguous than it is! Moreover, I think that changing correct answers, based on the students' comments (when comments should not even be read, according to the instructions!) is *extremely* incorrect, especially in cases when multiple answers (with penalties) are expected. Maybe I have done the same reasoning, but I thought it was too much "extreme" and I did not mark it in order to avoid the penalty.
* The quiz questions are very unclear. Although what we learn in the course is not really hard, it is still difficult to answer the questions correctly due to the way they are formulated.
* The quizzes should have a higher weight in the course, considering their size
* some quizz questions are ambiguous (though teachers are always open to discuss such questions and if students have good arguments, the grades can be changed which is great).
*  Not a fan of the quiz format this year, especially with questions that have the form: A has happened. Why? 1. B 2. C 3. Both B and C 4. Neither Last year there were more calculations instead of theory, which is more reasonable to test.
* Quizzes are a bit too hard.
* They do not test for knowledge of the contents of the course but try to trick people with ambigous or ill defined questions. Sometimes it feels like correct answers are arbitrarily chosen by the lecturers will, while other answers might just be as correct if one was given the chance to argue his/her point.

* Wish the breaks/schedules were respected, however.
* Time management is catastrophic. You should either change the schedule, cut some parts of the lectures or speak faster. "Q&A sessions" are basically non-existent (I don't really mind but they were still scheduled).
* I'm not happy with how the lecture slides are organized. There is a huge split-attention effect going on where it is often hard to get the overall picture because you need to combine things from different slides when it could be presented in a more accessible way.
* Often lectures would extend to the practical session and we would have much less time to work on those. This was annoying. Sometimes I just decided to skip them because I don't like working on something for just 30-60 minutes and only completing the first introductory part. 
* Le seul retour un peu négatif est le fait que des fois, le cours prend le dessus sur la session d'exercice et on enchaîne 3/4h de cours théorique ce que je trouve un poil trop afin de rester pleinement concentré
* the lectures are always longer than exepected (4 hours instead of 2 once ...), which leaves us with no time to do the exercises/hands on or to ask questions.

* I would like to have more practical tasks.
* I fell this course lacks from some more practical work. There should be some part of the grade assigned to some assignment or project.
* The course could have more interactive classes.
* More exercises would be really appreciated, some notions are difficult to learn due to the lack of practice.

* The coding exercices are too long and unclear.
* It would be useful for the corrections of the hand-on to be posted on the same page as the hand-on them self.
*  Explanation of the algorithms are sometimes confusing on the slides.
* the actual lecture is often more confusing than helpful. Also often important aspects/thoughts are left out on the slides. Some words/definitions are used ambigously (e.g. dependency).

* but Prof. Rajmann seems to create material on-the-fly that is not in the slides, which makes it hard to revise.