Computational Linguistics 19-20

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

Classes are on Mondays and Wednesdays at 13:00-15:00 and on Thursdays at 10:30-12:30. Detailed schedule

Please, note there are no classes on the 2th of October and on the 13rd of November

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 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.

July Exam The exam will be run using the same format of the winter exam: project (see above) and written exam. The latter will be run using Zoom. The lecturer will send the link to students beforehand. The students will have to turn the webcamera so to let the lecturer see the paper where he/she writes. At the end of the exam, students will send the written exercises to the lecturer by email before leaving the Zoom meeting. Students can leave the meeting only when all students have finished the exam and have sent it to the lecturer.

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.

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.) 23.09.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SYNTAX: Introduction to CL: admin, intro to Formal Languages, Regural Languages and Finite State Automata
Slides
2.)25.09.2019 (10:30-12:30)
Dialog systems and Chatbots Luciana Benotti (SLP: Ch. 24 )
Slides
3.) 25.09.2019 (13:00-15:00)
Reading Group on
NLP pipeline and Neural Networks: Tenney et al. ACL 2019 and Syntax-Semantics and Neural Networks: Jawahar et al. ACL 2019 (read by all, lead by RB)
organization of future Reading Groups and Brief intro to LaTeX
4.) 26.09.2019 (10:30-12:30)
SYNTAX (GRAMMAR): sentence structure, CFG, Chomsky Hierarchy, which FL for NL syntax, (SLP: Ch. 11)
Slides
5.) 30.09.2019 (10:30-12:30)
Natural Language Generation for Dialog Systems (Luciana Benotti)
Slides
6.) 30.09.2019 (13:00-15:00)
GRAMMAR: Pen and Pencile exercises on CFG
Summary in LaTeX of Filler-Gap and LSTM Wilxoc et al Blackbox 2018 (lead by Bogdan and Tanise)
7.) 03.10.2019 (15:00-17:00)
GRAMMAR: Feature Agreement and Unification Grammar
Correction of exercises on CFG.
Reading group on PoS tagger and gender issue Garimella et al ACL 2019 (Lead by Erick and Emma)
8.) 07.10.2019 (13:00-15:00)
GRAMMAR: Other Formal Grammars (TAG, DG, CG). Slides
Pen and Pencile exercises on CG, TAG and DG vs. CFG
09.) 09.10.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SYNTAX (Grammar) Reading Group about available treebanks and parsers:
CCGbank, (Helena Bonaldi and Margherita Fanton)
HPSG on Penn Treebank (by Marko Karetic and Xue)
Dependency Grammar (Milena Paladin and Sofia Simakova).
10) 10.10.2019 (10:30-12:30)
SYNTAX (PARSING): Top-down vs Bottom-up Parsing and Syntactic and Statistical Parsing. Slides (SLP: Ch. 12, 13 and 14)
Reading Group on
Shallow parsing and Keystrokes Plank COLING 2016 (by Chiara and Anna)
11) 14.10.2019 (13:00-15:00)
Correction of exercises on CG
Reading Group on on LSTM and CFL Sennhauser et al BlackBox 2018 Andrea De Varda and Ludovica de Paolis;

12) 16.10.2019 (12:30-14:30)
SEMANTICS: Formal Semantics: Introduction to Semantics, Brief intro to Logic, to Formal Semantics and semantic types.
Slides
13) 17.10.2019 (10:30-12:30)
SEMANTICS: Compositionality, lambda calculus. Slides Exercises on Formal Semantics.
14) 21.10.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SEMANTICS: More exercises on lambda-calculus
Exercises
15) 23.10.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SEMANTICS: Abstraction in the lambda calculus Slides
16) 24.10.2019 (10:30-12:30)
SYNTAX-SEMANTICS: Lambda calculus, CFG and CG
Slides
17) 28.10.2019 (13:00-15:00)
Exercises on lambda and CFG-lambda


18) 30.10.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SEMANTICS: Distributional Semantics Models
Slides
19) 31.10.2019 (10:30-12:30)
Summary and Discussion on Paper on LS (Landauer and Dumais (1997)) lead by RB
20) 04.11.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SEMANTICS: Summary on vectors, matrices Lab on DSM; Presentation by ALL students of the implementational work done with Luca.
21) 06.11.2018 (13:00-15:00)
SEMANTICS: Discussion on the evaluations in Sahlgren and Lenci (2016) by Nicola Sartorato and Francesca Pase and Baroni, Dinu and Kruszewski (2014) lead by Nhut Truong and Zhuolun
22) 07.11.2019 (10:30-12:30)
SEMANTICS: Compositional DSM Slides
23) 11.11.2019 (10:00-12:00)
SEMANTICS: Summary and Discussion on Paper on DSM (Conneau et al. ACL 2018) lead by Duygu Buga. Start discussing ideas about projects.
24) 18.11.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SEMANTICS: Summary and Discussion on Papers on CDSM Baroni In press lead by by Alex Eperon and Valentino Penasa
25) 20.11.2019 (13:00-15:00)
SEMANTICS: Thesis presentation by Ludovica Panifto
Summary and Discussion on (Reddy, S. et al 2011)by Abdel-akram Anis Saidi and
26) 21.11.2019 (10:30-12:30)
Discussion about projects (Luca Ducceschi will join us)
Reharsal of exercises on CG and lambda


27) 25.11.2018 (13:00-15:00)
MULTIMODAL MODELS: Introduction to Language and Vision
Slides
28) 27.11.2019 (13:00-15:00)
MULTIMODAL MODELS: Overview of current work on LaVi at UniTN
Slides
29) 28.11.2019 (10:30-12:30)
Sample Written Exam
30) 02.12.2019 (13:00-15:00)
Sample exam correction
31) 11.12.2019 (10:30-12:30)
PROJECTS PROPOSAL PRESENTATIONS by CL students
32) 12.12.2019 (10:30-12:30)
PROJECTS PROPOSAL PRESENTATIONS by CL students
Exam: 03.02.2020

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