CSCI 544

Natural Language Processing

Spring 2009

Tu / Th 2:00-3:20, KAP 140

 

Instructors

Prof. Jerry Hobbs and Prof. Eduard Hovy

With guest appearances by Ms. Rutu Mulkar-Mehta, Dr. Ulf Hermjakob , Prof. Anton Leuski , Prof. David Traum , Prof. David DeVault

 

Textbooks

Daniel Jurafsky and James Martin. Speech and Language Processing . Prentice Hall, 1999.

Optional extra: Christopher Manning and Hinrich Sch¸tze . Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing . MIT Press, 1999.

Optional extra: James Allen. Natural Language Understanding (2nd ed ). Addison Wesley, 1994.

Optional extra: Ehud Reiter and Robert Dale. Building Natural Language Generation Systems . Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 

 

Syllabus

  Jan 13

 

  Hovy

  Introduction to NLP

 

 

Natural Language Generation

 

 

 

 

Jan 15

 

Hovy

Gen I: Overview and Realization by Phrasal Expansion

 

Jan 20

 

Hovy

Gen II: Realization using Feature Grammars and Unification

HW Ia

Jan 22

 

Hovy

Gen III: Probabilistic Realization

 

Jan 27

 

Hovy

Gen IV: Discourse Structure

 

Jan 29

 

Hovy

Gen V: Macroplanning with RST

 

Feb 3

 

Hovy

Gen VI: Microplanning

HW Ib

Feb 5

 

Hovy

Gen VII: Generator Control by Pragmatics: The Role of Style    

 

 

  Syntax and Semantics

 

 

 

 

Feb 10

 

Hobbs

S&S I: General Framework 1

 

Feb 12

 

Hobbs

S&S II: General Framework 2

 

Feb 17

 

Hobbs

S&S III: Parsing, Logical Form, and Abduction

 

Feb 19

 

Hobbs

S&S IV: Problems of Local Pragmatics

 

Feb 24

 

Hobbs

S&S V: Problems in Interpreting Discourse

 

Feb 26

 

Hobbs

S&S VI: Problems Relating to Domain Formalization

HW II Instructions

 

Natural Language Parsing

 

 

 

  

Mar 3

 

Mulkar-Mehta

Parsing I: Syntax, Syntax Representation and Parsing Algorithms

 

Mar 5

 

Hermjakob

Parsing II: Shift-Reduce Parsing

 

Mar 10

 

Mulkar-Mehta

Parsing III: Simple Parsing Strategies

 

Mar 12

 

Mulkar-Mehta

Parsing IV: Complex Parsing Strategies

 

Mar 17

 

 

  spring break

 

Mar 19

 

 

  spring break

 

Mar 24

 

Traum

Dialogue

 

Mar 26

 

Mulkar-Mehta

Parsing V: Probabilistic Parsing

HW III

 

  Applications

 

 

 

 

 

  

Mar 31

 

Hovy

Apps I: Information Extraction

 

Apr 2

 

Hovy

Apps II: Question Answering and Evaluation

 

Apr 7

 

Hovy

Apps III: Speech Recognition

 

Apr 9

 

Leuski

Apps IV: Information Retrieval 1 Theory

 

Apr 14

 

Leuski

Apps V: Information Retrieval 2 Practice

 

Apr 16

 

Chiang

Apps VI: Machine Translation 1 Theory

 

Apr 21

 

Chiang

Apps VII: Machine Translation 2 Statistical Practice

 

Apr 23

 

Hovy

Apps VIII: Text Summarization

 

Broader Perspectives

 

 

 

  Apr 28

 

  Hovy

Apps IX: Evaluation

HW IV

  Apr 30

 

  Hovy

Topics in Psycho- and Neurolinguistics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Assignment Details

There are 4 assignments, each worth 25% of the final mark.