In progress: The syllabus is evolving.
Make sure to check the errata for the textbook as you do your readings.
| Class | Topic | Readings* | Assignments | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 30 | Course administrivia, overview of the field |
Ch 1 and 21 (yes, 21!) | Assignment 1 | solution |
| Feb 6 | Components of NLP; finite-state automata and regular expressions; nondeterminism | Ch 1, 2, 21 | Assignment 2 | Solution: lisp, output |
| Feb 13 | N-grams and association | Ch 6 | Assignment 3 | Solution |
| Feb 20 | HMMs and the noisy channel model | Ch 5 (Sec 5.4 and Sec 5.9 up to p. 176); Ch 7 (Intro, Sec 7.1 and 7.2); Ch 8 (all) | Assignment 4 | Optional readings on Zipf's law, and Good-Turing Smoothing Without Tears. |
| Feb 27 | More on "shallow" quantitative models | Same as last week | Keep working on Assignment 4 | none |
| Mar 6 | Morphology | Ch 3. | Assignment 5 | solution |
| Mar 13 | HMM training and EM (guest lecture by Rebecca Hwa) | none | none | none |
| Mar 20 | HMM training; unsupervised learning | Ch 9. | none | none |
| Mar 27 | Spring break | none | Assignment 6: Project proposal | none |
| Apr 3 | Grammars and stack-based parsing | Ch 9-10. | none | none |
| Apr 10 | Chart parsing | Ch 10, 12. | Assignment 7 | Stack-based parser algorithms; Textbook errata |
| Apr 17 | Treebanks and probabilistic parsing | Chapter 12. | TBA | none |
| Apr 24 | Semantics | Ch 14,16. | TBA | none |
| May 1 | Applications (TBA) | none | none | |
| May 8 | Project Presentations (Class will meet in AVW 1112) | none | none | none |