Frequently Asked Questions#

Question: I’m stuck with an exercise. Should I e-mail the instructor?

Answer: After reading through this FAQ, please see the previous discussions on Gitter first.

Question: How can I contact the instructor?

Answer: You can reach the instructor via e-mail at applied-language-technology@helsinki.fi.

Question: When I attempt to test my exercises using TMC by entering the command tmc test, I receive an error that says “Error in plugin”. What should I do?

Answer: This means that your code causes the Jupyter Notebook that contains the exercise to crash. Before running the command tmc test, make sure you can run all the cells in the notebook without crashing the notebook. Note that this does not cover errors raised by your code.

Question: When I submit my exercises to the TMC server, the submission takes a long time and finishes with an error. What should I do?

Answer: This probably means that your code has an infinite for loop or another problem, which causes the TMC server to terminate the submission. All exercises should run within a reasonable amount of time.

Question: When I submit my exercises to the TMC server, the server raises the error 413 Payload Too Large.

Answer: The size of submissions to the TMC server is limited to 30 megabytes. Make sure your Jupyter Notebook does not contain excessive output e.g. for debugging purposes, and that you have not placed big files (e.g. language models) into the exercise directory.

Question: I’ve finished the exercises and the final examination. How do I get a completion on mooc.fi?

Answer: See the instructions on requesting a completion for your coursework here.

Question: When I try to download a Stanza language model and run tests on the TMC server, I get an error saying that a connection cannot be established to the server that hosts the language models.

Answer: Read the assignment instructions again: there is no need to download a language model in any exercise. Outgoing connections from the TMC server are banned for security reasons.

Question: I have completed all the exercises and mooc.fi shows “Total progress” to be 100%, but the “Exercises completed” is less than 100%.

Answer: Don’t worry, mooc.fi also tracks upcoming exercises that will be published in the next iteration of these courses. You’ve done all the work needed for completing the course!

Question: I’m thinking of sharing my coursework with my friend for easy credits. Will I get caught?

Answer: Very likely – the logs are monitored for unusual activity, which is followed up by cross-checking solutions. Any attempt to cheat will be reported to the higher education institution the student is currently enrolled in, and may have serious repercussions.