General
Computational Linguistics
References
Resources
Links
Course Description (08-09)
Syllabus
Objectives
Grading
Practical Info
News
Participants
Material ('08-'09)
Textbooks
Lecture Notes
Labs
Critiques
Projects
Weekly Programme

Computational Linguistics Course A.A. '08-'09 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%: project presentation. Summer session: Monday 04/06/09,
    • 50%: final exam. Summer session: Monday 22/06/09, 15:00-17:00

    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 2008-2009. Lectures: Thursdays (10:30-12:30). Labs: Thursdays (15:00-16:00).
    • Place: See the updated info in the: RIS
    • Office hours: Thursdays 14:00-15:00 during the course period (confirmation by email) or by prior arrangement via e-mail during the whole academic year

    News ^

    19-05-2009
    Project presentation. 03.06.09 will be in Room C.3.6, we will start around 08:30, a timetable will be announced once I know who will be presenting the projects.
    06-05-2009
    Project presentation. Wednesday 03/06/09, hr TBD
    03-05-2009
    Final exam. Monday 22/06/09, 15:00-17:00
    03-05-2009
    On the 07-05-2009 there will be 2 hrs Lab. We will be doing a sample exam.

    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:

    Lecture Notes ^

    During the frontal lessons I will use slides that will made available after the lesson from this link.

    Labs^

    Labs aim to give you hands-on experience on the topic presented during the frontal lessons. We will use Prolog for the first part of the exercises (on syntax and parsing). During the second part we will be doing pencile and paper on the lambda caluclus and the interface between syntax and semantics.

    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.

    Projects^

    During the second part of the labs, students will carry out small projects on the base of their interest and backgrounds. Some suggestions are listed here.

    • Controlled Natural Language and Onotology Learning: Christian, Thomas and Ronell
    • Lambek Calculus-theoretical, Dmitry.
    • Multilingual Chatter-Bot Evgeny
    • Treebanks (Dependency Grammar) (TBD-corpus mivas?) Lenka
    • BoB and OPAC, Pham (meeting on Thursday)
    • BoB and speech syntesis, Salim (meeting on Friday)
    • TAG and semantic representation (TBC--papers sent) Septina
    • Implement some Parsing Algorithm (TBD) Luthfi
    • Underspecification-theoretical (TBD) Giedrius
    • Prolog: syntax-semantics (see DRT book) (TBD), David


    • NLTK's many suggestions
    • Critique/Slides on Joshi's paper on "TAG"
    • Question type tagger for BoB
    • Underspecification
    • Critque/Slides on "An Efficient Context Free Parsing Algorithm from Jay Earley"
    • ACE
    • Chunk Parser
    • Semantics in Prolog,
    • Finite State Automata
    • Machine Translation
    • Brill's algoritm and Tiger Corpus
    • LSA
    • TAG
    • Incremental parsing

    • 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
    05/03/09 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.
    12/03/09
    		 Syntax I Chapter 9: Coordination; Formal Grammars; Context-Free Rules and Trees; Sentence-Level Constructions, Chomsky Hierarchy. FSA: morphology and syntax Formal Grammars: Compiler
    19/03/09
    		 Syntax II, Chapters 9, 11: Agreement; The VP and Subcategorization; Feature Structures; Unification of Feature Structures; Features Structures in the Grammar. See also BS CFG in Prolog  
    26/03/09
    		 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
    02/04/08 Semantics I
    exercises     		Chapter 15.1,15.2: Syntax-Driven Semantics; Lambda-Calculus. [Inference]. See also BB1
    Left-corner    		 Reasoning methods: Computational Logic, Knowledge Representation
    09/04/09 Semantics II   lambda calculus ex.  
    16/04/09 No lecture   lambda calculus ex. II  
    23/04/09 Syntax-Semantics Interface: CFG and CG Slides only CFG, CG and lambda calculus
    30/04/09 Lambek Calculus My thesis, Ch. 1 LC and lambda terms
    07/05/09
    Lab 15:00-17:00 (2hrs!)
    Comparison of Formal Grammars
    Controlled Natural Language         		  Sample written exam  
    14/05/09 QA and IQA
    BoB
    History of CL    		 Slides Correction of sample exercises  
    21/05/09 Yannick Versley:
    Statistical parsing    		      
    28/05/09 Valia Kordoni:
    Math foundations of constraint-based theories    		      
    03/06/2009
    2hrs    		     Projects Presentation  
 
Last modified 17-02-2007 by Raffaella Bernardi.