CSCI 544

Natural Language Processing

Spring 2008

Previous semesters: Spring 2007

Tu/Th 2:00-3:20, VKC 157

Instructors

Prof. David Chiang, Prof. Jerry Hobbs, Prof. Eduard Hovy

With guest appearances by Prof. Ulf Hermjakob, Prof. Anton Leuski, Prof. Ellen Riloff, 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.

· Supplemental reading list (not required) for module on Parsing.

Syllabus

Jan 15	Hovy	Introduction to NLP
Syntax and Semantics
Jan 17	Hobbs	S&S I: General Framework 1
Jan 22	Hobbs	S&S II: General Framework 2
Jan 24	Hobbs	S&S III: Parsing, Logical Form, and Abduction
Jan 29	Hobbs	S&S IV: Problems of Local Pragmatics	EXAM SOLUTIONS
Jan 31	Hobbs	S&S V: Problems in Interpreting Discourse
Feb 5	Hobbs	S&S VI: Problems Relating to Domain Formalization
Natural Language Generation
Feb 7	Hovy	NLG I: Overview and Realization by Phrasal Expansion
Feb 12	DeVault	Realization by Statistics 1
Feb 14	DeVault	Realization by Statistics 2
Feb 19	Hovy	Macroplanning
Feb 21	Traum	Dialogue
Feb 26	Hovy	Semantic Representations for NLG	HW II
Natural Language Parsing
Feb 28	Hermjakob	Parsing I: Shift-Reduce Parsing
Mar 4	Chiang	Parsing II: Earley Recognition Algorithm
Mar 6	Chiang	Parsing III: Earley Recognition Algorithm, contd.	HW III
Mar 11	Chiang	Parsing IV: Tree-adjoining grammars
Mar 13	Chiang	Parsing V: Synchronous Grammars
Mar 18		spring break
Mar 20		spring break
Applications
Mar 25	Leuski	Apps I: Information Retrieval 1 Theory
Mar 27	Leuski	Apps II: Information Retrieval 2 Practice
Apr 1	Hovy	Apps III: Machine Translation 1 Theory
Apr 3	Hovy	Apps IV: Machine Translation 2 Statistical Practice
Apr 8	Hobbs	Apps V: Info Extraction 1 Older Approaches
Apr 10	Riloff	Apps VI: Info Extraction 2 Recent Work
Apr 15	Hovy	Apps IX: Text Summarization	HW IV
Apr 17	Hovy	Apps VII: QA and Evaluation
Apr 22	Hovy	Apps VIII: Speech Recognition
Broader Perspectives
Apr 24	Hovy	Apps IX: Pragmatics and Style
Apr 29	Hovy	Topics in Psycho- and Neurolinguistics
May 1	all	Closing: Joint appearance

Assignment Details

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