Teaching resources
Public tutorials and practical references for programming, NLP, applied machine learning, and research computing.
39 standalone lessons, technical references, and course-adjacent guides.
In Training, context, and evidence, we supplied source material and examples in the prompt. Now we'd like to build on that experiment: how do we choose what goes into the prompt, and how do we make the answer useful to our code?
Suppose you ask a model for a number from a paper. You could put the whole table in the prompt, or give the model a way to look up one row. With the OpenAI Chat Completions API, your code decides which tools to offer and whether the model gets to choose when to...
In this lesson, we'll learn some of the key concepts behind clustering.
In this lesson, we'll learn about distance and similarity metrics.
This lesson introduces you to the basics of Docker.
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use to represent words and documents with vectors of features.
This tutorial introduces the course workflow for using Forgejo repositories created through Class Maestro.
This lesson introduces you to the basics of the Git version control system.
This tutorial introduces you to using GitHub.
Earth's time zones are bad enough to manage, but it turns out there's a whole galaxy of worlds out there. We certainly don't want to phone Zarbonia after hours. Knowing how time zones work doesn’t tell our assistant what time it is right now.
This lesson introduces tokenization as the step where language models turn written text into token IDs. It includes a short concrete example using the tokenizer associated with gpt-oss-20b, without loading the model weights.
Messages from the Zarbonian Empire regularly reach Earth, its most distant and recent addition, in fragments. Our archival assistant has to make sense of these incomplete transmissions. Here's one of them:
This tutorial provides instructions for installing Docker on Ubuntu. While the steps outlined here may work for other versions of Ubuntu (and some non-Ubuntu Linux distributions), these instructions were tested against Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
This tutorial provides instructions for installing the latest Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) version using VirtualBox.
This tutorial provides instructions for installing Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu. While the steps outlined here may work for other versions of Ubuntu (and some non-Ubuntu Linux distributions), these instructions were tested against Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
This lesson introduces you to the concept of containerization.
In this tutorial, we're going to step through training a naïve Bayes classifier with n-gram features using a popular machine learning library in Python called scikit-learn. This library provides implementations and an easy-to-use interface for many supervised and...
In this lesson, we'll look at a definition of token and see some examples in English.
This is a brief look at tokenization and part of speech assignment in Japanese.
In this lesson, we'll learn about estimating the probability of n-grams and see how we can approximate the probability of a document using n-gram probabilities.
This tutorial provides instructions for launching an instance (virtual server) on Jetstream 2 using the Exosphere user interface.
This tutorial introduces you to the basics of the Linux command line.
youtube: https://youtu.be/wAstsGTgWw
In this lesson, we'll learn about n-grams and see how they can be used as general features to represent words and documents.
This lesson provides an introduction to named entities (NEs).
This lesson provides an introduction to parts of speech.
Ambiguity and uncertainty abound in natural language. In this lesson, we'll learn the basics of probability which will help us to quantify that uncertainty.
Suppose you ask a model about a paper you've just read. It gives you a confident, detailed answer. Has it actually read the paper? What changes if you supply the text yourself?
In this lesson, you'll be introduced to regular expressions (regexes) and practice using this pattern language to identify spans of text.
How might we represent a sequence while keeping track of what we've already seen? A recurrent neural network (RNN) updates a hidden state as it moves through the sequence. We'll follow those updates, connect them to PyTorch, and then look at gated RNNs and encoder-decoder...
This tutorial introduces SSH keys for Git-based coursework.
In this lesson, we'll learn a little about the connection between regular expessions and state machines. You'll explore this topic in much more depth in LING 538.
For the brave and curious, let’s go back to Table 5. Gemma called the right tool and got the right page, but read the F1 score as precision. Would a crop of the table help? This optional tutorial for Part 2 follows the tool calling tutorial. If you want to run...
This lesson provides an introduction to text normalization.
In earlier lessons, we introduced the idea of tokens and discussed some of their attributes. We devised some informal descriptions of the clues that signal token boundaries (ex. whitespace, contractions, etc.). In this lesson, we'll how to use regexes to tokenize...
In the previous lesson, our Galactic Archives assistant generated continuations of a fragmented message. Now we'd like it to help us answer questions about the Archives. That calls for more than a plausible continuation.
Suppose we're translating a story. The information we need for the next word may be somewhere in the source text, rather than in the last word we translated. How can a model revisit that information and decide what to use?
This tutorial provides a crash course in using the University of Arizona's High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters.
In this lesson, we'll learn about the components of vectors, as well as some basic vector operations.
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