Announcements || Academic Integrity || Description
Links to Resources || Requirements || Syllabus || Text || Thanks

Description:

This course provides an introduction to the field of computational linguistics, aka natural language processing (NLP) - the creation of computer programs that can understand, generate, and learn natural language. We will  focus on the three major subfields of NLP: syntax (the structure of an utterance), semantics (the truth-functional meaning of an utterance), and pragmatics/discourse (the context-dependent meaning of an utterance). The course will introduce both knowledge-based and statistical methods for NLP, and will illustate the use of such methods in a variety of application areas.

Text:

Speech and Language Processing by Jurafsky and Martin. It should be available from the Columbia bookstore, as well as from Amazon and other online providers. Please check the online errata for the text for each chapter as you read it.

Requirements:

Three homework assignments, a midterm and a final exam.

Homework 1 submission procedure.

Academic Integrity:

Copying or paraphrasing someone's work (code included), or permitting your own work to be copied or paraphrased, even if only in part, is not allowed, and will result in an automatic grade of 0 for the entire assignment or exam in which the copying or paraphrasing was done. Your grade should reflect your own work. If you believe you are going to have trouble completing an assignment, please talk to the instructor or TA in advance of the due date.

Announcements:

NOTE: For HW2-II you are expected to divide the data yourself into training and test sets. About 20% test.

FINAL EXAM: Tuesday, 17 December 2002, 1:10-4, MUD 825

Emotional speech survey, 'Like' article, Interesting Language Factoids and Non

Syllabus:

Links to Resources (cf. also resources available from the text homepage):

General:

Places to look up definitions and descriptions of terminology:

• Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (select 'language and usage')

Chapters 1 and 2:

Try out one of the many versions of Eliza on the web.

Chapter3:

AT&T Labs - Research Finite State Machine Library

Later Chapters:

• Appelt and Israel's information extraction tutorial (IJCAI-99).
• Framenet.

Chapter 19:

• Ask Jeeves -- a search engine that answers questions in plain English.
• Answer Bus -- another Q/A system.
• Columbia's NewsBlaster summarizer
• IBM summarizer demo (canned)
• Systran machine translation (also in use at Babelfish)
• AT&T Labs - Research Finite State Machine Library
• Michael Collins' Parser
• On-line dictionaries in many languages.
• WordNet
• Framenet
• CoBuildDirect Corpus
• AT&T's SCANMail voicemail browsing/search system
• DiaLeague 2001 -- includes a link to an online dialogue system demo.
• James Allen's Dialogue Modeling for Spoken Language Systems ACL 1997 Tutorial
• Festival speech synthesizer demo and links to other TTS systems
• Julia Hirschberg's Intonational Variation in Spoken Dialogue Systems tutorial

Thanks:

To James Martin, Diane Litman, Johanna Moore and Regina Barzilay, whose course materials have been very helpful in the preparation of this course and to Ani Nenkova for her useful comments.

Announcements || Academic Integrity || Description
Links to Resources || Requirements || Syllabus || Text || Thanks