Course Info for Ling645/CMSC723, Fall 2005

Course Info for Ling645/CMSC723, Fall 2005
Computational Linguistics I


Class mailing list

Once we've gotten it set up, students should be on the class mailing list. Messages are archived on a weekly basis.

Essentials

What's the course about?

This is the first semester in our two-semester graduate sequence in computational linguistics. In the first semester, we will be disussing fundamental methods in natural language processing, with a focus on core representations and algorithms. Topics include: finite-state methods, context-free and extended context-free models of syntax; parsing and semantic interpretation; n-gram and Hidden Markov models, part-of-speech tagging; natural language applications such as machine translation, automatic summarization, and question answering. Students completing this course will have a solid working knowledge of the basics of NLP and will be well prepared for the second semester course, which covers natural language processing with a focus on corpus-based statistical techniques.

Students taking this course should be competent programmers, since concepts taught in class will be reinforced in practice by hands-on programming assignments. We are not assuming a great deal of familiarity with linguistics; students needing to get up to speed on linguistics concepts will do fine with Jurafsky and Martin's material on word classes and context-free grammars for English (in Chapters 8 and 9).

Please feel free to contact us with any questions, and feel free to suggest the course to anyone who might be interested.

See the schedule of topics for class-by-class plans.

How will the course be graded?:

Students will be evaluated on their ability to master the content of the material in the course and to think critically about ideas presented to them.

Policy for Incomplete Work

Course Accounts

Class work will take place on Linux servers on the OIT Computing Cluster -- log in to linux.grace.umd.edu. Students who do not already have a GLUE account should request one so that I can give you a course account.

The two class directories are:

  /afs/glue.umd.edu/class/fall2005/ling/645/0101
  /afs/glue.umd.edu/class/fall2005/cmsc/723/0101
and student directories are available under subdirectory 'student'. See the file system page for the directory layout. and see the file removal timeline for important information about what gets deleted when at the end of the semester.

See instructions on turning in programming assignments for important information.

Check out these notes for some useful information about computing in the GRACE cluster environment in C++, Python, and Java.