Computational Linguistics Course A.A. '07-'08 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 literature, a critique of a selected paper and a description of your own idea/implementation. 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 17/06/08 (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 2007-2008. 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
^
- 27-02-2008
- The Labs will start on the 20th of March.
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 preparing the
slides and 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.
- NLTK's many suggestions
- Critique/Slides on Joshi's paper on "TAG", Gokarna P. Sharma
- Question type tagger for BoB, Dinh Le Thanh
- UnderspecificationFaisal Chowhdury
- Critque/Slides on "An Efficient Context Free Parsing Algorithm from Jay Earley" Stanislav Skotnick
- ACE, Marco Trevisan
- Chunk Parser Auste
- Semantics in Prolo, Tsvetan Dunchev
- Finite State Automata, Abhinav
- Machine Translation, Anja Roubickova
- Brill's algoritm and Tiger Corpus, Philipp Volgger (??)
- LSA, Alessandro Ercolani
- TAG (?), Ana
- Incremental parsing, Martin M.
- Report on: Lexical Semantics
- CCG and Boxer
- A morphological parser (FSA): KIMMO
- Unification-based syntactic parser (Feature Structures): PATR
- Dialogue
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 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28/02/08 | 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. | ||
| 06/03/08. Lec: 08:30-10:30 |
Syntax I | Chapter 9: Coordination; Formal Grammars; Context-Free Rules and Trees; Sentence-Level Constructions, Chomsky Hierarchy. | Formal Grammars: Compiler | ||
| 20/03/08. Lec: 08:30-10:30 Lab: 14:00-16:00 |
Syntax II, | Chapters 9, 11: Agreement; The VP and Subcategorization; Feature Structures; Unification of Feature Structures; Features Structures in the Grammar. See also BS | FSA: morphology and syntax | ||
| 27/03/08 Lec. 08:30-10:30, Lab: 14:00-15:00 |
Parsing | Chapter 10, 11: Bottom up Parsing; Top down Parsing; Depth First Search; Breadth First Search; [Feature Unification]. See also BS | CFG:syntax | Text Processing, Compiler | |
| 03/04/08 Lec: 08:30-10:30, Lab: 14:00-16:00 |
Semantics I | Chapter 15.1,15.2: Syntax-Driven Semantics; Lambda-Calculus. [Inference]. See also BB1 | Bottom-up and Top-down Recognizers |
Reasoning methods: Computational Logic, Knowledge Representation | 10/04/08 | Semantics II | LAB Cancelled |
| 17/04/08 14:00-16:00 |
Syntax-Semantics Interface | Slides only | lambda calculus Summary about parsing. |
||
| 24/04/08 | Categorial Grammar Lambek Calculus |
My thesis, Ch. 1 | CG and lambda terms | ||
| 08/05/08 |
Comparison of Formal Grammars Controlled Natural Language | Sample written exam | |||
| 15/05/08 | QA and IQA BoB |
Slides | Correction of sample exercises | ||
| 22/05/08 | Discourse | slides | |||
| 29/05/08 | History of CL | ||||
| 06/06/2008 2hrs |
Projects Presentation |