Course Information for Ling645/CMSC723

Course Information for Ling645/CMSC723
Introduction to Computational Linguistics


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General Course Information

Where/When:
Wednesdays, 1:00pm-3:30pm,
The first class will be in
Symons Hall, Room 0200 but after that the class will meet in AV Williams, Room 1112.

Professors:
Bonnie Dorr, bonnie@cs.umd.edu, Office hours: Tuesdays, 1pm, AV Williams 3157
Philip Resnik, resnik@umiacs.umd.edu, Office hours: Wednesdays, 4pm, AV Williams 3143

Teaching Assistant:
Wei-han (Vincent) Huang, vincenth@wam.umd.edu, Office hours: MW 3:30-4:30pm, TA room, first floor AV Williams Bldg.

Textbooks:

Course Description

General statement. This course is an introduction to computational linguistics. It assumes some basic familiarity with linguistics concepts and requires the ability to program. We will be covering traditional foundations of computational linguistics areas such as finite-state methods, context-free and extended context-free models of syntax, parsing, and semantic interpretation; basics of more recent corpus-based and stochastic methods such as n-gram models, hidden Markov models, probabilistic grammars, and statistical methods for word sense disambiguation; and some selection of application areas from among such topics as information retrieval, machine translation, computational psycholinguistics, and computational lexicography. Concepts taught in class will be reinforced in practice by hands-on programming assignments.

Course Requirements

  1. Exercises. Students will turn in (a) a program listing, and (b) a trace of the code working successfully. Students are encouraged to work together, but every assignment must contain one of the following statements:

    1. I completed this assignment solo.
    2. I collaborated to a small extent with [name(s)] on this assignment.
    3. I collaborated extensively with [name(s)] on this assignment.

  2. Programming projects. These will be larger in scope than the exercises, and may or may not be distributed with solutions. Students may choose to collaborate as for the exercises, but each module or subroutine must identify a single primary author, to be agreed upon by the collaborating students.

  3. Exams. The course will have a mid-term exam and a final exam, with no final programming project.

    Grading in the course will be based on 60% for the exercises and programming projects and 20% each for the midterm and final.


  Philip Resnik                        Phone:   (301) 405-6760
  Department of Linguistics            Fax:     (301) 405-7104
  1401 Marie Mount Hall
  University of Maryland 
  College Park, MD 20742 USA

  Bonnie Dorr                          Phone:   (301) 405-6768
  Computer Science Department
  3157 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 resnik@umiacs.umd.edu.

This page last updated February 01, 2001.