An interactive spreadsheet for teaching the forward-backward algorithm

Authors:
Jason Eisner
Affiliations:
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Venue:
ETMTNLP '02 Proceedings of the ACL-02 Workshop on Effective tools and methodologies for teaching natural language processing and computational linguistics - Volume 1
Year:
2002

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Abstract

This paper offers a detailed lesson plan on the forward-backward algorithm. The lesson is taught from a live, commented spreadsheet that implements the algorithm and graphs its behavior on a whimsical toy example. By experimenting with different inputs, one can help students develop intuitions about HMMs in particular and Expectation Maximization in general. The spreadsheet and a coordinated follow-up assignment are available.