Course Information for CMSC723/Ling645
Introduction to Computational Linguistics: Fall 2004

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General description

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General Course Information

Where/When:
Wed, 4pm-6:30pm,
Computer Science Instructional Center (CSIC) 1122

Instructors:
Bonnie Dorr (bonnie@cs.umd.edu) and Christof Monz (christof@umiacs.umd.edu).
Office hours:
Bonnie Dorr: Fridays (but please send an email to make sure that Dr. Dorr is in the office)
Christof Monz: Wednesdays after class

Teaching Assistant: Adam Lee (adamlee@umiacs.umd.edu)
Office hours: Mondays and Tuesdays 4-5pm (room: 1151 AV Williams Building)

Textbook:
Dan Jurafsky and James Martin, "Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and Computational Linguistics", Prentice-Hall (2000). Make sure to check the errata for the textbook as you do your readings.)

Course Description

General statement. This course is an introduction to computational linguistics. It assumes some basic familiarity with linguistics and programming. We will be covering traditional foundations of computational linguistics areas such as finite-state methods, n-gram modeling, Hidden Markov Models, context-free and extended context-free models of syntax, parsing, and semantic interpretation; basics of more recent corpus-based and stochastic methods; and some selection of application areas from among such topics as machine translation, lexical acquisition, speech recognition, and information retrieval. Concepts taught in class will be reinforced in practice by hands-on programming assignments.

Course Requirements

  1. Exercises and Programming projects. Students are encouraged to work together, but every assignment and programming project must be completed by the individual whose name appears on it. Students will submit assignments and programming projects by the deadline (details to be provided in the "TA Corner").
    There is a 10% late penalty for late assignments and projects. Assignments or projects turned in more than 3 days late will receive no credit. Assignments are due at 11:59 pm of the due date. For instance assignments due on Sep 22, should be submitted the latest at 11:59 pm on Sep 22.

  2. Exams. The course will have a mid-term exam (Wednesday, Oct 20, 4-6pm) and a final exam (Wednesday, Dec 15, 4-6pm).
    Click here for the official policy for excused absence from exams.

  3. Grading. Grades in the course will be based on the assignments, programming projects and the midterm and final exams. The final grade is composed as follows:
    12total
    exam25%25%50%
    project15%15%30%
    assignment10%10%20%
    Note that exam 1 is the midterm exam and exam 2 is the final exam.

    Please note the late-penalty specification above. 

 
  Bonnie Dorr                          Phone:   (301) 405-6768
  Computer Science Department
  3153 AV Williams Building
  University of Maryland 
  College Park, MD 20742 USA

  Christof Monz                        Phone:   (301) 405-1139
  Computer Science Department
  3161 AV Williams Building
  University of Maryland 
  College Park, MD 20742 USA

By far the best way to reach us is by e-mail to 
bonnie@cs.umd.edu and christof@umiacs.umd.edu.
PLEASE USE A UMD ACCOUNT TO SEND US EMAIL
(or you may risk spam filtering).
This page is last updated on August 28, 2004.