CMCS723/LING723 Computational Linguistics I Fall 2008, Course Plan
	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.

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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.

• administrivia
• semester plan
• overview of NLP, by Bonnie
• introduction to statistical NLP, by Saif

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

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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.

• Introduction to Python and NLTK

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

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September 17: WORDS by Saif

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

• regular expressions
• finite state automata
• morphology
• finite state transducers

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

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September 24: WORDS by Saif and Nitin

Reading: Chapter 5.1-5.4 and 5.6

• finish morphology and FSTs
• part-of-speech tagging
• introduction to HMMs

Lecture notes: POS tagging

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October 1: WORDS by Nitin

Reading: Chapter 5.5, 6.1-6.4

• hidden Markov models (HMMs)
• expectation-maximization and HMM training

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

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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

• context-free grammars (CFG)
• linguistic phenomena

Lecture notes: Syntax Ia, Syntax Ib

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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.

• context-free parsing: CYK, Earley by Bonnie
• tree adjoining grammars by Nitin
• midterm review by Saif and Nitin

Lecture notes: Syntax II
Lecture notes: CCG and TAG

Assignment 2 is due

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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.

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October 29: WORDS by Nitin

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

• N-gram language models

Lecture notes: N-grams

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

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November 5: SEMANTICS by Saif

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

• representing meaning
• word senses
• word sense disambiguation
  • supervised
  • unsupervised
  • semi-supervised

Lecture notes: WSD

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November 12: SEMANTICS by Saif

Reading: Chapter 20 (Sections 20.6--20.9)

• lexical semantic relations
• semantic distance
  • WordNet-based measures
• distributional measures

Lecture notes: WSD and Semantic Distance
Assignment 4 (on word senses and semantic distance) is posted. Asssignment 3 is due.

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November 19: APPLICATIONS

Reading (optional): Statistical Machine Translation by Adam Lopez

• machine translation

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November 26: APPLICATIONS by Saif

See forum for details of this class.

• clustering
• first and second-order co-occurrences
• singular value decomposition

Assignment 4 is due

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December 3: APPLICATIONS

Reading: Combining Bidirectional Translation and Synonymy for Cross-Language Information Retrieval
Reading: 2005 Johns Hopkins Summer Workshop Final Report on Parsing and Spoken Structural Event Detection

• information retrieval
• segmentation in speech NLP

Lecture notes: Information Retrieval
Lecture notes: Segmentation for speech NLP

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December 10: APPLICATIONS and WRAP-UP by Saif

• example applications of NLP on the web
• example visualisations of natural language
• exam overview
• wrap-up

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FINAL EXAM: December 17 2008, 4 to 6 pm

Review

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Last updated: October 2008