Schedule

Syllabus

April 12, 2002

April 1-3-5	Chap 1	Introduction
April 8-10-12	Chap 8	Lexical tagging
April 15-17-19	Chap 11	Unification grammars
April 22-24-26		Sound; PSTL fieldtrip (Jackson & Ashley)
April 29-May 1-3	Chaps 14-15	First order predicate calculus and semantic analysis
May 6-8-10	Chaps 16-17	Lexical semantics and word sense disambiguation
May 13-15-17	Chaps 18-19	Discourse structure and dialogue
May 20-22-24	Chap 20	Natural language generation Final project proposals due
May 29-31	Chap 21	Machine translation and multilingual systems
June 3-5		Final project preliminary presentations

Work:

Textbook readings as on the schedule

Occasional brief exercises

Participation in a group presentation on one of the topics from the syllabus. The group should

choose an actual NLP system that exemplifies the topic
research it from source code or publications
prepare a presentation for Friday's class meeting on the system: describe its goals, its architecture and operation, and discuss its adequacy as a representation of natural language

Final projects: topics negotiable. Some possibilities:

A research paper similar to the 'group project', but describing more than one system
A small implementation of some aspect of natural language processing (with a brief writeup describing implementational and theoretical issues involved)
A description of an architecture for a system that accomplishes some aspect of NLP, with a comparison to existing systems and a theoretical motivation for the design