Computational Linguistics Course A.A. '06-'07 at FUB
Course Description
Syllabus^
Why is language/speech difficult and interesting?; Ambiguity; History of the field; Morphology; Syntax; Semantics; Pragmatics; Formal Grammars; Parsing; Logic and NLP.
Objectives ^
This course presents a graduate-level introduction to computational linguistics, the primary concern of which is the study of human language use from a computational perspective. The principal objectives of the course are to provide students with a broad overview of the field, and prepare them for further study computational linguistics and language technologies. No previous knowledge of linguistic theory and linguistic applications is assumed. Some background in First Order Logic is preferred.
Grading^
- 50%: You are to complete an independent project on some topic in computational linguistics. Projects will be presented either (a) to the lecturer only (in this case, you will have to send a written report), or (b) to the other students too during the lab session (in this case you will have to prepare slides). The presentation must include a brief overview of the litterature, a critique of a selected paper and a description of your own idea/implementation. Labs will be used to carry out your project under the supervision of the lecturer (see below). Projects' topics will have to be decided together with the lecturer. You can find tips on how to write a paper and on how to give a talk here.
- 50%: final exam. Summer session: Tuesday 12/06/07 (To be confirmed).
Practical Info^
- Students: Compulsory course for (first year) students enrolled in the European Masters Program in LCT. Optional course for 2nd and 3rd year bachelor students and students of other MSc offered at FUB, Faculty of CS.
- Pre-requisites: None (some background in Logic is preferred.)
- Lecturer: Dr. Raffaella Bernardi
- Credits: 4 credits (24 hs lectures, 12 hs labs)
- Schedule: 2nd semester 2006-2007. Lectures: Thursdays (08:30-10:30). Labs: Thursdays (14:00-15:00).
- Place: See the updated info in the: RIS
- Office hours: Thursdays 10:30-12:30 during the course period (confirmation by email) or by prior arrangement via e-mail during the whole academic year
^
- 18-03-2007
- Changed lab schedule: the 09.04.2007 FUB is closed (Easter Holiday)
- 07-03-2007
- From the 15th of March onwards Labs will be on Mondays 17:00-18:00.
- 16-02-2007
- Thursday 22nd of February, there will be no Lab
Participants^
For organizational reasons, it would be good if you could register to the course expressing your intend to attend it by sending an e-mail to the lecturer. Please, specify whether you are a Bachelor or a Master student, and, in the latter case, whether you will be following the European Masters Program in LCT. If you have not done it yet, please fill in this form and return it to the lecturer.Material
Textbooks^
The recommended text books for the course are:- Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Prentice-Hall, 2000.
- Patrick Blackburn and Kristina Striegnitz (BS) Natural Language Processing Techniques in Prolog
- Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos (BB1) Representation and Inference for Natural Language A First Course in Computational Semantics
- Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos (BB2) Working with Discourse Representation Theory
Lecture Notes ^
During the frontal lessons I will use slides that will made available after the lesson from this link.
Labs^
TBA (Based on students' background)Critiques^
Guidelines for writing critiques
An example of a critique of A
Prototype Reading Coach that Listens. Mostow et al. AAAI 94.
If you want to write your critique in LaTeX, you will find this site intersting. Below a first proposal for the reading material.
- Lauri KarttunenApplications of Finite-State Transducers in NLP [FST, morphology]
- Eric Brill. Transformation-Based Error-Driven Learning and NLP: A case study in POS Tagging. 1995. [PoS]
- Jay Earley An Efficient Context Free Parsing Algorithm. 1970. [Parsing]
- Blackburn and Bos Computational Semantics [Semantics]
- Something about lambda-calculus (with implementation in PROLOG) [Semantics]
- Something about underspecification [Semantics]
- Aravind Joshi. "Tree-Adjoining Grammars". In The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (In the Library)[FG, TAG]
- Aravind Joshi. "Starting with Complex Primitives Pays Off: Complicate Locally, Simplify Globally". Elsevier Science, 2004. [FG, TAG]
- Michael Moortgat. Categorial grammar and formal semantics. In L. Nagel (ed.) Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Vol. 1, pp. 435-447. London, Nature Publishing Group. 2002.[FG, CTL]
- Something about DRT [Discourse]
Projects^
During the second part of the labs, students will carry out small projects on the base of their interest and backgrounds. The topics are listed here.
- A morphological parser (FSA): KIMMO (chosen by Yansen)
- Unification-based syntactic parser (Feature Structures): PATR
- Computational Semantics: Lambda, Prolog (Chosen by Alejandra and Quoc)
- Dialogue
- Text Simplification (Domenico and Francesca?)
- CCG and Boxer (Daniel and Marija?)
Weekly Programme ^
The program below is provisional since it will be adapted to the students background. Slides will be updated through the course after each lesson.| Date | Slides | SLP | Lab | Deepen in/Related to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22/02/07 | Introduction to LCT and CL | Chapters 1-3,8.1,8.2: Course Info; Goals of CL; Challenges: Ambiguities at all levels; Morphology; Finite State Automata; Part-of-Speech; Word Class; Constituency. | FSA: Theory of Computing,Formal Languages. PoS: Text Processing. | |
| 28/02/07 (17:00-19:00) | Crash Course on Prolog | Prolog: Programming Languages | ||
| 01/03/07. Lec: 08:30-10:30 Lab1:10:30-12:30 |
Syntax I | Chapter 9: Coordination; Formal Grammars; Context-Free Rules and Trees; Sentence-Level Constructions. | FSA: morphology and syntax | Formal Grammars: Compiler|
| 08/03/07. Lec: 08:30-10:30 Lab2:10:30-11:30 |
Syntax II, Exercises | Chapters 9, 11: Agreement; The VP and Subcategorization; Feature Structures; Unification of Feature Structures; Features Structures in the Grammar. See also BS | CFG:syntax | |
| 15/03/07 Lec. 08:30-10:30, Lab3: 10:30-11:30 |
Parsing | Chapter 10, 11: Bottom up Parsing; Top down Parsing; Depth First Search; Breadth First Search; [Feature Unification]. See also BS | Bottom-up and Top-down Recognizers | Text Processing, Compiler |
| 19/03/07 Lab4:17:00-18:00 |
| Left Corner Recognizer and Parser |
| ||
| 22/03/07 | Semantics I | Chapter 15.1,15.2: Syntax-Driven Semantics; Lambda-Calculus. [Inference]. See also BB1 | Reasoning methods: Computational Logic, Knowledge Representation | |
| 26/03/07 Lab5:17:00-18:00 |
| Exercises: Lambda-calculus |
| ||
| 29/03/07 | Semantics II | |||
| 02/04/07 Lab6:17:00-18:00 |
| Cancelled due to illness |
| ||
| 05/04/07 | Syntax-Semantics Interface: CG and CTL | My thesis, Ch. 1 | ||
| 09/04/07 Lab7:17:00-18:00 |
| UNI. CLOSED |
| ||
| 12/04/07 | History of Formal Grammars; Comparison of Formal Grammars Files on TAG | Slides only | ||
| 16/04/07 Lab8:17:00-18:00 |
| Exercises:CG and lambda-terms |
| ||
| 19/04/07 | Formal Grammars II | Chapter 13: Generative Power; The Chomsky Hierarchy; Complexity. | ||
| 23/04/07 Lab9:17:00-18:00 |
| Recap: Exercies |
| 26/04/07 | Discourse | TBA |
| 30/04/07 Lab10:17:00-18:00 |
| Correction of Ex. on Lambda term |
| ||
| 03/05/07 | Dialogue | TBA | ||
| 07/05/07 Lab11:17:00-18:00 |
| Reading Group or Project preparation(?) |
| ||
| 10/05/07 | IQA | |||
| 14/05/07 Lab:17:00-19:00 |
| Work on Projects |
| ||
| TBA | Projects Presentation |