Computational Linguistics 18-19

The Computational Linguistics course is taught by Raffaella Bernardi (RB) (UniTN)

Classes are on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 13:00-15:00 and on Fridays at 13:30-15:30. For updated information, see the online time-table

Information about the final exam

The exam will consist of two parts each contributing the 50% of the total mark:

  1. written exercises on the Syntax, Semantics and their interface
  2. written report on a topic selected among those presented in class. The report can be either a project proposal based on a literature review or the report on a project based on a literature review. The report has to be written in LaTeX.

Students of the Text Processing course will do one of the two parts at their choice. They have to inform the lecturer of their choice at least two months before the exam.

Students have to agree on the topic of the report with the lecturer at least one month before the exam.

We will rely on programming skills taught by Luca Ducceschi in the course Computational Skills for Text Analysis (first semester). Students are highly reccomended to attend it, in particular if they lack a computational background. My course is complementary to Carlo Strapparava's course on Human Language Technologies (second semester). The Formal Semantic part will be presented in depth in Roberto Zamparelli's course on Logical Structures of Natural Language (first semester from 30th of October 2018.)

Materials

If you are interested in textbooks about FS:

For further information, see the suverys and tutorials below:

Topics with a rough schedule

Schedule

1.) 19.09.2018
SYNTAX: Introduction to CL: admin, intro to Formal Languages, Regural Languages and Finite State Automata
Slides
2.) 20.09.2018
SYNTAX (GRAMMAR): sentence structure, CFG, Chomsky Hierarchy, which FL for NL syntax, (SLP: Ch. 11)
Slides
3.) 26.09.2018
GRAMMAR: Pen and Pencile exercises on CFG
Brief intro to LaTeX LaTex Base
4.) 27.09.2018
GRAMMAR: Feature Agreement and Unification Grammar
Slides,
5.) 28.09.2018
GRAMMAR: Correction of exercises on CFG.[Exercises with solutions]
6.) 03.10.2018
GRAMMAR: Summary in LaTeX of a paper on HPSG (Simon)
Other Formal Grammars. Slides on TAG, DG, CG.
7) 04.10.2018
SYNTAX (Grammar) Pen and Pencile exercises on CG, TAG and DG vs. CFG, and comparison of available treebanks (CCGbank, Peen Treebank).
8) 05.10.2018
SYNTAX (PARSING): Top-down vs Bottom-up Parsing. Slides
Syntactic and Statistical Parsing (SLP: Ch. 12, 13 and 14)[Slides]
Summary of a paper on TAG (Joshi 2009, Eleonora, Greta and Ali)
9) 10.10.2018
Correction of exercises on CG
Summary on DG vs. Constituency (Gildea 2004 or Alonso et al 2017) by Natalia, Erica and Siavosh;
summary on DG (de Marneffe et ali. 2014 or Strubell et al. 2018) by Dina and Darya)
10) 11.10.2018
PARSING: Dependency Grammar Parsing by Barbara Plank
Slides

11) 12.10.2018
SEMANTICS: Formal Semantics: Introduction to Semantics, Brief intro to Logic, to Formal Semantics and semantic types.
Slides
Exercises on CFG and feature agreement?? NLTK Ch 9(SLP: Ch. 11)
12) 17.10.2018
SEMANTICS: Compositionality, lambda calculus. Slides
13) 18.10.2018
SEMANTICS: Exercises on Formal Semantics.
14) 19.10.2018
SEMANTICS: Abstraction in the lambda calculus Slides
15) 24.10.2018
SYNTAX-SEMANTICS: Lambda calculus, CFG and CG
Slides
16) 25.10.2018
Exercises on lambda and CFG-lambda


17) 26.10.2018
SEMANTICS: Distributional Semantics Models
Slides
18) 31.10.2018
Summary and Discussion on Paper on LS (Landauer and Dumais (1997)) lead by RB
19) 07.11.2018
SEMANTICS:Summary on vectors, matrices Lab on DSM; Presentation by Students of the implementational work done with Luca.
20) 08.11.2018
SEMANTICS: Discussion on the evaluations in Sahlgren and Lenci (2016) and Baroni, Dinu and Kruszewski (2014) lead by Daria and Erica
21) 09.11.2018
SEMANTICS: Compositional DSM, Slides
22) 14.11.2018
SEMANTICS: lab on CDSM, DISSECT by Sandro Pezzelle
23) 16.11.2018
SEMANTICS: lab on CDSM, DISSECT by Sandro Pezzelle
24) 21.11.2018
SEMANTICS: Summary and Discussion on Paper on DSM (Erk 2016) lead by Siavosh and Natalia
25) 22.11.2018
SEMANTICS: Summary and Discussion on Paper on CDSM (Vecchi et al. 2018) and Linzen 2016 lead by Dina and Ali
26) 23.11.2018
SEMANTICS: Summary and Discussion on (Reddy, S. et al 2011) and (McGregor, S. et al. 2017) lead by Greta and Eleonora


27) 27.11.2018 (10:30-12:30 -NOTE CHANGE OF DATE)
MULTIMODAL MODELS: Introduction to Language and Vision
Slides
28) 29.11.2018
MULTIMODAL MODELS: Overview of current work on LaVi
Slides
29) 04.12.2018 (11:00-13:00)
Sample Written Exam
NOTE DIFFERENT DAY.
30) 06.12.2018
Sample exam correction
31) 12.12.2018 (9:30-12:00)
PROJECTS PROPOSAL PRESENTATIONS by CL students
19.12.2018 (14:00-16:00), Written exam

Readings we will discuss in class (discussion lead by one or two students each time)

Cognitively-inclined work on dialogue.

Very recent work on Language and Vision

Further readings

Further (classical) readings


Some of the people who are doing interesting work on C/DSM or Language and Vision

  • Katrin Erk
  • Alessandro Lenci
  • Gemma Boleda
  • Aurelie Herbelot
  • Kate Saenko
  • ...