Computational Linguistics

Syllabus, Spring 2002

This course will deal with computational linguistics (the use of computers to model human language capability) and natural language processing (the use of computers in various applications involving natural language). We will focus on phenomena above the word level - i.e. syntax, semantics, and discourse, but not phonology or morphology.

There is a textbook for the course, available at the bookstore:

Jurafsky, Daniel & James H. Martin (2000). Speech and language processing. NJ: Prentice Hall. Website: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~martin/slp.html (sample chapter & links)

Possible topics from the book. Under each heading, I give first the relevant linguistic concepts, then the related computing concepts and algorithms.

Tagging

• Lexical categories, boundaries
• Models: rule-based, stochastic

Context-free grammars

• Constituency and order
• Parsing: top-down, bottom-up, composite (Earley)

Features and unification

• Feature systems in syntax, Unification Grammar, inheritance
• Directed acyclic graphs, unification algorithm

Grammar and Meaning

• First Order Predicate Calculus, semantic networks, event semantics, lambda calculus
  
• Integrating semantic analysis in a unification parser, an Early parser
  

Words and meaning

• Taxonomy, meronymy, frames, fields, primitives, metaphor, metonymy
  
• Wordnet, Framenet, CYC
  

Word sense disambiguation

• Word sense disambiguation; selectional restrictions; homonymy, polysemy, synonymy
  
• Information retrieval, machine learning, bootstrapping, dictionaries, vector spaces, queries
  

Discourse

• pragmatics, reference resolution; coherence; discourse structure
  
• salience, tree search, centering; inference
  

Dialogue

• Turns, utterances, grounding, conversational implicature, speech acts
  
• Plan-inferential algorithm, cue-based algorithm, conversational agents
  

Generation

• Rhetorical structure, systemic-functional grammar, lexical selection
  
• RST, functional unification grammar
  

Machine translation

• Typology, word order, event structure
  
• Transfer, interlingua, direct translation