Home CMCS723/LING723 Computational Linguistics I
Fall 2008, Course Plan
Home
Instructor: Saif Mohammad
Co-instructor: Nitin Madnani
Course co-ordinator: Bonnie Dorr
  Class:
  Wednesdays, 4 to 6:30pm, Computer Science Instructional Center (CSIC) Room 3120
   
 

Text:

Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and Computational Linguistics, second edition (published in 2008), by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin.
   
  Guest lectures:
  by Bonnie Dorr, Philip Resnik, and Doug Oard.
   
  Overview:
  The lectures in this course will cover topics in four broad areas of Computational Linguistics (words and morphology; syntax; semantics; and pragmatics) and some specific applications.

September 3: INTRODUCTIONS and OVERVIEW by Saif and Bonnie

Reading: Chapter 1 of J&M; Secton 1.3 and 1.4 from this chapter in Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing.

Lecture notes: Course details and Introduction to statistical NLP, Overview of Computtional Linguistics
Assignment 0 posted (not for credit)

September 10: NUTS and BOLTS by Nitin

Reading: NLTK Book (Chapters 1 and 2); Python Beginners' Guide (includes resources for both programmers and non-programmers); ACM article on Getting Started on NLP with Python.

Lecture notes: Introduction to Python and NLTK
Assignment 0: finish Q1 before class.

September 17: WORDS by Saif

Reading: Chapter 2, Section 2.2 onwards; Chapter 3.

Lecture notes: FSA, FST, morphology
Assignment 0: turn in solutions to both Q1 and Q2
Assignment 1 (on finite state automata) posted

September 24: WORDS by Saif and Nitin

Reading: Chapter 5.1-5.4 and 5.6

Lecture notes: POS tagging

October 1: WORDS by Nitin

Reading: Chapter 5.5, 6.1-6.4

Lecture notes: HMM and EM
Assignment 1 is due; Assignment 2 (on POS-tagging and HMM) is posted

October 8: SYNTAX by Bonnie

Reading: This week and next week's lecture will draw from subsets of the slides at these two URLs:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~martin/SLP/Slides/slp12.pdf
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~martin/SLP/Slides/slp13.pdf

Lecture notes: Syntax Ia, Syntax Ib

October 15: SYNTAX by Bonnie and Nitin; Midterm Review by Saif and Nitin

Reading: This week and last week's lecture draw from subsets of the slides at these two URLs:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~martin/SLP/Slides/slp12.pdf
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~martin/SLP/Slides/slp13.pdf

TAG: Pages 1-13 and 27-33 (Section 8) of Aravind Joshi and Yves Schabes, Tree-Adjoining Grammars, in Handbook of Formal Languages, G. Rozenberg and A. Salomaa (eds.), Vol. 3, Springer, Berlin, New York, 1997, 69-124.

CCG: New Ch 12 (Section 12.7); Mark Steedman, Categorial Grammar (tutorial overview), Lingua, 90:221--258, 1993; and Shieber et al. (1995) section 4.

Lecture notes: Syntax II
Lecture notes: CCG and TAG

Assignment 2 is due

October 22: MIDTERM

Midterm review: These questions are to help you focus your preparation for the midterm. This is not a substitute for the readings for all the classes so far.

This is a two-hour in-class exam.

October 29: WORDS by Nitin

Reading: Chapter 4 (Sections 4.1--4.7; 4.9.1)

Lecture notes: N-grams

Assignment 3 (on n-grams and smoothing) is posted

November 5: SEMANTICS by Saif

Reading: Chapter 19 (Sections 19.1--19.3); Chapter 20 (Sections 20.1--20.5)

Lecture notes: WSD

November 12: SEMANTICS by Saif

Reading: Chapter 20 (Sections 20.6--20.9)

Asssignment 3 is due; Assignment 4 (on WordNet and semantic distance) is posted

November 19: APPLICATIONS

November 26: APPLICATIONS by Saif

Assignment 4 is due

December 3: APPLICATIONS

December 10: APPLICATIONS and WRAP-UP by Saif

FINAL EXAM: December 17 2008, 4 to 6 pm

Last updated: October 2008