Computational Linguistics: 2009-2010
Information
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Lecturer |
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Degrees |
Michaelmas Term — MSc in Computer Science Part C — Honour School of Mathematics and Computer Science |
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Term |
Michaelmas Term 2009 (16 lectures) |
Overview
The aim of this series of lectures is to provide an introduction to some of the major topics in computational linguistics. No previous knowledge of linguistics is required.Learning outcomes
By the end of this lecture series you should understand what the concerns of computational linguists are and be familiar with some of the major topics in the area. You should also be in a position to find out more of the practical details for yourself.Synopsis
We will try to cover the following topics:
- Brief introduction to linguistics.
- Part of speech tagging: Hidden Markov Models; transformation based learning
- Symbolic natural language parsing: shift reduce; charts; packing.
- Statistical natural language parsing: chunking; lexicalised grammars.
- Semantics and inference: logic, theorem proving and question-answering.
- Language generation: sentences from logical forms; planning paragraph length texts, etc.
- Dialogue models: speech acts; conversational games.
- Putting it all together: (i) a natural language interface (ii) WWW information extraction
Syllabus
We will try to cover the following topics:
- Brief introduction to linguistics.
- Part of speech tagging: Hidden Markov Models; transformation based learning.
- Symbolic natural language parsing: shift reduce; charts; packing.
- Statistical natural language parsing: chunking; lexicalised grammars.
- Semantics and inference: logic, theorem proving and question-answering.
- Language generation: sentences from logical forms; planning paragraph length texts, etc.
- Dialogue models: speech acts; conversational games.
- Putting it all together: (i) a natural language interface (ii) WWW information extraction
Reading list
The following textbooks cover much of the material. More detailed references will be given with the lectures. Lecture handouts will be supplied.- James Allen 1995 Natural Language Understanding, Addison-Wesley Pub Co, 2nd edition.
- An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, 2000, Prentice-Hall.