Schedule of Topics: CMSC/LING 723


This is the schedule of topics for Computational Linguistics I (CMSC/LING 723), Fall 2007.

Readings are from the second edition of Dan Jurafsky and James Martin (to be published in 2007), "Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and Computational Linguistics." Although this edition is not yet available for purchase, you may click here for the updated chapters.

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Class Topic Readings Lecture Notes Assignments
Aug 29 Administrivia, semester plan; overview of NLP; Intro to MT (Bonnie) New Ch 1 Lecture Notes 1 --
Sep 5 MT continued (Bonnie) New Ch 24.1, 24.2, 24.9 (will become Ch 25 in final edition) Lecture Notes 2 Assignment 1 (no-credit ice-breaker; Due Sept 19)
Sep 12 Introduction to Python and NLTK (Nitin) 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 3 --
Sep 19 Finite State Automata, Regular Expressions, Intro to Morphology (Bonnie) New Ch 2; Start New Ch 3 Lecture Notes 4 Assignment 2 (Due Oct 3)
Sep 26 Morphology and FSTs (Bonnie) Finish New Ch 3; New Ch 5 (Sections 5.1-5.4) Lecture Notes 5 --
Oct 3 Hidden Markov models (HMMs), Expectation-Maximization and HMM training (Nitin) New Ch 5 (Section 5.5), New Ch 6; See also the Wikipedia entry on dynamic programming HMM handout
Lecture Notes 6
Assignment 3 (Due Oct 17)
Oct 10 Context-free grammars (CFG), linguistic phenomena, complexity (Bonnie) New Ch 12 (Sections 12.1-12.6), Parts of New Ch 15. Lecture Notes 7 --
Oct 17 Context-free parsing: CYK, Earley (Bonnie) New Ch 13; See also Wikipedia: CYK algorithm and Shieber et al. (1995) sections 1-3 Lecture Notes 8 Take home midterm handed out. (Due Oct 31)
Oct 24 Attend Two NLP Colloquia 10/10/2007 11-12, AVW 2120 (Speech): Mary Harper abstract, slides;
10/17/2007 11-12, KIM 1105 (NLP Apps): Chris Dyer, Jimmy Lin abstract and slides;
10/31/2007 11-12, AVW 2460 (Language Acquisition): C. Anton Rytting abstract
-- --
Oct 31 N-gram language models (Nitin) New Ch 4: sections 4.1-4.7, 4.9.1 Lecture Notes 9 Assignment 4 (Due Nov 14)
Nov 7 Lexical semantics (Bonnie) New Ch 19 Lecture Notes 10 --
Nov 14 Semantics New Ch 17 Lecture Notes 11 and Earley Parser revisited Assignment 5 (Due Nov 28)
Nov 21 Noisy Channel Model and Transformation-Based Learning THIS MATERIAL HAS MOVED TO DEC 5 New Ch 5.5 (intro and 5.5.1); New Ch 9.1; New Ch 5.6 Lecture Notes 12 --
Nov 28 Tree-adjoining grammars and Combinatorial Categorial Grammars (Nitin from Bonnie's notes) 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; see also additional pointers to important TAG-related papers in these notes for a seminar lecture given by Yuqing Guo in 2006/2007.

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 13 --
Dec 5 Finish Semantics and Notes from Lecture 12; Use of Paraphrase in MT; Exam Review (Bonnie, Nitin) Review sheet and Nitin's Paraphrase article. Study!! Take home final handed out Dec 12th, Due Dec 19th