Syllabus for Ling 645/CMSC 723, Fall 1997
Syllabus for Ling 645/CMSC 723, Fall 1997
Introduction to Computational Linguistics
Course goals
The primary goal of the course is to provide students the basic things
they need to do further computational work with language -- thus the
approach is more "toolkit" than "philosophy". Specifically, students
will get the following:
- Survey. Familiarity with the major areas and problems in
computational linguistics.
- Tools. Understanding of and experience with core techniques in
natural language processing.
- Programming. Experience with writing programs to solve problems
and explore empirical questions.
Course requirements
- Getting a Unix account and paying attention to course
announcements via e-mail
- Weekly or near-weekly homework assignments,
some including programming in Common LISP (40%)
- Two "hourly" exams (as opposed to a single midterm) (40%)
- Final exam (20%)
Outline of topics
- Overview of computational linguistics. Levels of natural
language analysis. Elements of natural language processing systems.
- Automata and grammars. Finite-state formalisms, FST-based morphology,
context-free grammars and variants.
- Parsing. Top-down and bottom-up methods. Dynamic programming
and chart parsers. Time complexity.
- Features and augmented grammars. Features in syntactic
formalisms. Unification.
- Natural language semantics. First-order predicate calculus.
Lambda-reduction. Quantification. Entailment. Interpretation
as abduction.
- Knowledge representation. Taxonomies and inheritance.
KL-ONE variants and subsumption. Preference semantics.
- Corpus-based methods. Frequency, probability, and estimation.
Types of corpus annotation. Classification paradigm and
supervised learning.
- Application areas. Speech recognition. Message understanding.
Machine translation.
Philip Resnik Phone: (301) 405-6760
Department of Linguistics Fax: (301) 405-7104
1401 Marie Mount Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742 USA
By far the best way to reach me is by e-mail to resnik@umiacs.umd.edu.